A Long Courtship
by RillaOfIngleside
Summary: Six years pass between Detective-Inspector Charles Parker falling unsuitably but irretrievably in love with Lady Mary in “Clouds of Witness”, and proposing marriage to her in “Strong Poison”. What was happening in between?
1. 1

_Author's Note: Of course I love Lord Peter, but for my money Charles Parker has always been the true hero of Sayers' wonderful novels, and the slow but stately progress of his courtship of Lady Mary appeals to me more even than that of Lord Peter and Harriet Vane (perhaps because it's so unlikely, and we get so little information on it in the novels, so we can make our own castles out of these small seeds). Updates of this fic ought to be slow and stately, too, as I'm only re-reading the books along with the lovely @wimseypod podcast, so there ought to be about one a month. _

Chapter 1: The Clouds Disperse

It was a very jolly party who breakfasted at 110A Picadilly on the first frosty morning of the winter. Lord Peter Wimsey and Detective Inspector Charles Parker had both had a day to recover from their well-deserved but perhaps slightly over exuberant celebrations on the night following the Duke of Denver's acquittal: Lord Peter by spending the whole day in his splendid dressing gown playing Scarlatti sonatas to himself with a vacant smile on his face, and Charles by burying himself in some nice soothing routine police work. What a relief, he had reflected to himself, to be working on a new case which was clearly going to be one of those which could only be solved, if at all, by diligent thoroughness and in which he felt no personal interest at all. He had positively beamed, despite his headache, as he compiled and surveyed a list of leads on the series of robberies he was now investigating. So many potential suspects, but not a one who would lose him sleep at night.

Now he was ensconced in one of Peter's very comfortable chairs and pausing with a fork full of kedgeree halfway to his mouth as he allowed himself the briefest of gazes at Lady Mary. He was almost entirely at ease in the Dowager Duchess's company, although he'd felt supremely conscious of his plebeian clothes and his northern vowels when he had first met her, and he frequently almost forgot that Peter was a member of the gilded aristocracy at all. He told himself that it was only because he didn't know Lady Mary nearly so well, and because he had so recently been having to include her in his list of murder suspects, that he couldn't say the same about her. All the same, he had to admit that if his problem had been the natural unease which consciousness of a huge class divide creates, then a degree of stiltedness in conversation might have been expected to ensue, and there wasn't any of that between he and Lady Mary. Whilst Peter and his mother had discussed in great and vigorous detail the new motor car that Peter proposed to buy, Charles and Mary had spoken easily and naturally on a number of topics and he had been very glad to make her laugh several times, her violet eyes lighting up as if a flame was burning inside them. Nor could class consciousness explain why now, as he looked at her, the pale and brittle morning sun streaming in through the window behind her so that he reminded her of the angels in the Burne-Jones windows at Birmingham Cathedral with all their other-worldly beauty, he found he was out of breath and had been staring at her mouth for what now seemed to be a damnably awkwardly long time.

He pulled his gaze away and realised that the Dowager Duchess was pouring further coffee into his cup, and a long-winded but very sincere thank you into his ear.

"We mustn't thank old Parker, you know, Mother" Peter interrupted, jovially. "He doesn't like it. Makes him uneasy, what? Besides, don't be fooled by his respectable countenance. He's as keen on the thrill of the chase for the Truth - Oh, our ever-elusive mistress! - as I am."

Charles was indeed a respectable man, and his respectability was underpinned by quiet but sincere Anglican beliefs. But he was also an experienced policeman who had first made his name in the police force by exposing a ring of pimps and brothels, so it was intolerable that he should find himself flushing at someone saying the word "mistress" in Lady Mary's presence.

"Oh, but it's not for having worked so hard and having so cleverly uncovered the truth," Mary interjected. To his credit, Peter let this pass without observing that he too had had rather a large hand in finding out the truth which had led to their brother's acquittal. "We know that any police inspector would have done that." There passed between Peter and Charles that flash of understanding which close friends can share without either word or look when they each know precisely what the other is thinking. They had known more than one policeman of whom that could not have been said.

"It's because Mr Parker has been so kind and such a gentleman throughout," Mary added. "Had it been anyone but you, I don't know how I could have borne it." She said the last sentence softly, as though she and Charles were the only people in the room, or perhaps the world. Charles felt as though he were on a ship that was lurching wildly to one side. His heart didn't seem to be in anything like its normal place, and its beat thudded in his ears. He forced himself to say something gruff but coherent about it being a pleasure to do anything he could to make such a trying time easier (what an infinitesimally small fraction of the truth that was! He almost laughed as he said it) and then asked Mary what her plans were now.

Mary grinned wryly, lending her face a momentarily boyish air. Charles felt giddy, the more so because it was so unlike him. He wanted to shout with the sheer joy of her beauty, the delight of finding her so exquisite in all her different moods. "Mother's persuaded me back up to Denver for awhile, and in truth I've no fancy for being in town until the public memory of my many poor judgements has faded a little. But I mean to do something useful and sensible now, and I have a few plans in mind, so I shall be back quite early in the New Year."

At this point Bunter appeared at the table to murmur a discreet reminder of the impending departure time of the train upon which the Dowager Duchess and Lady Mary's seats were booked. "What do you say, Charles?" Peter said. "Can you spare half an hour to toddle down to the station with me and see these ladies safely onto a train, whence they can cause us no further trouble?"

"Don't be an ass, Peter," Mary said, comfortably. "Do come if you can, Mr Parker." In an attempt at something like his usual equable tone although his heart was racing and he felt as though he would have gone to the Arctic Circle if Mary had asked him to, Charles replied simply that he should be glad to.

In the taxi to the station the Dowager Duchess and her children discussed, with no little wry trepidation, the mood in which they could expect to find the Duke, who had preceded them the day before, and more particularly the Duchess. Mary grew weary of this topic before the others, and turning to Charles said brightly "Mr Parker, Peter tells me that your people are from Cumbria. Are you able to see them very often? It must be quite a journey".

Charles hesitated. He was in no way ashamed of his good, decent lower-middle-class background or his family, but he was no Bolshevik and had a deep sense of what, according to his lights, was fitting. Peter's words of some nights before, "_Mother and Jerry must have got to the point when they'd welcome a decent, God-fearing plumber"_ in respect of Mary's romantic choices were imprinted helpfully in his mind, but somehow didn't help him believe that anything he had to say about his background would be of interest or value to a Duke's daughter. Seeing his hesitation, Mary grinned her disarming grin and said "Oh come, Mr Parker. You know so much about my family and my past - and very little of it to my credit - that I simply must know something of yours. Or must I wait until you introduce us to your sister? Sisters, you know, are extremely apt to tell their brothers' darkest secrets, and Peter said that you have one for whom you buy underwear in Paris."

Although the instinct to shoot Peter a dark look for divulging his friend's own secrets this way was strong, Charles couldn't help but laugh at the statement which, although true, painted a picture of a sister very different from Dulcie Parker, a good, solid spinster ten years older than Charles and whose chief pleasures, as far as he know, were derived from accompanying the Sunday school choir at the piano and from doing fancy needlework. His laugh broke the awkwardness of his hesitation and he found himself telling Lady Mary the story of making his purchases in Paris, knowingly poking fun of his own stolid implacability in the face of a delicate situation. She bubbled over with laughter, and exclaimed "But what a heroic gesture, Mr Parker! After all, persevering in the face of embarrassment takes more courage, particularly for an Englishman, than almost anything else."

Charles reflected that this was true, and it encouraged him to say, as he handed her onto the burgundy plush of the first class carriage, "I wish you'd dine with me when you do come back up to Town, Lady Mary". She said with such obvious genuine pleasure "I'd simply love to, Mr Parker" that he found himself keeping hold of the hand he was about to relinquish and pressing it instead to his lips. Charles was more surprised than anyone. He had never kissed anyone's hand before (it wasn't much done in Barrow-in-Furness); indeed, he'd never even thought of kissing anyone's hand. But thinking about it later he reflected that with Lady Mary looking so lovely, and so brave despite clearly being shaken by all the events of the previous 6 weeks, there hadn't been anything else he could reasonably have done. When he came to his senses, he was aware of Peter looking determinedly in another direction and Lady Mary smiling down at him from the carriage.

The two men walked away through the station in one direction whilst the train pulled away on the other. Peter looked at his friend appraisingly. "I think I'll leave you here", he said pleasantly. "Nothing against Love's Young Dream, and all that, but it's a bit much to stomach so soon after breakfast. Cheerio!" And he hopped into a taxi which had appeared, as so often they seemed to do for Lord Peter's convenience, out of thin air.

Lady Mary, meanwhile, stared absently out of the window as the train begun its gentle chugging journey.

"Such a nice young man", her mother was saying, "with those extremely broad shoulders which of course one always notices and feels so impressed by, although I can't think why because after all what does anybody do using exclusively their shoulders, other than I suppose if one wanted to throw oneself at a door to break it down as some of the more lurid detective fiction available suggests, though really I would have thought it it would be easier to find a way to do what I believe is called "picking the lock" - that's the kind of thing that Peter probably knows all about if we cared to ask him but of course there's a balance, isn't there, between taking a friendly interest and..."

The Dowager Duchess continued, both skirting all around the point and very much to the point at the same time. Mary smiled absently, thinking thoughts not unconnected to the breadth of Mr Parker's shoulders, and indeed to the gentle strength of his large hands when they were holding hers.


	2. 2

_Author's note: this fic contains enormous spoilers for the short story "The entertaining episode of the article in question", which is contained in "Lord Peter views the Body". We have no evidence in the text that Mary was at the wedding, but then again, we have no evidence that she wasn't..._

Lady Mary Wimsey was no fool: she knew when she was in fine looks, and on the day of Lady Sylvia's wedding she certainly was. Whatever other aspersions could be laid at Sylvia's door, she wasn't the type to choose unflattering dresses for her bridesmaids the better to set herself off, and Mary was well pleased as she stepped into the ice blue costume - dress and jacket - which the couturier had delivered along with the 6 other bridesmaid dresses, the bridal gown and assorted accoutrements, all final alterations made, to the Medway house on Park Lane the previous evening.

Besides, as Sylvia herself remarked in slightly cynical tones which belied her general reputation for stupidity, everyone would be looking at the famous blasted Medway diamonds and not at any member of the wedding party.

"Such a bore to have to have them, dear, but Mother would insist." Sylvia said, waving away the maid who was hovering anxiously to do her hair, as she, Mary and Sylvia's younger sister Laura dressed together in the large front bedroom. "Something delicate and fresh would have been so much better suited to my complexion."

"Oh, well. I suppose if one doesn't wear them at a family wedding, then what's the point of having them at all? Just sitting in a bank shining away to themselves," said Mary, with the easy philosophical detachment of one not required to wear heavy jewellery for which she didn't care on her wedding day. "Besides, they _are _rather splendid." She added, smiling, as she looked at her friend, "I'm sure Abcock at least won't be too distracted by them to admire you."

"I shouldn't think he'd notice if I were wearing pyjamas" said Sylvia, placidly, "or even whether I were there at all, unless I were followed up the aisle by foxes and hounds. Oh, don't look like that, Laura!" she added, catching the horrified expression on her young sister's face in the looking glass. "I'm long past the point of wanting a man to moon over my beauty every time he sees me. There's a lot to be said for marrying a man who you like well enough, and who's likely to leave you alone more often than not - isn't there, Mary?"

Having made her appeal for support of this pragmatist approach to state of holy wedlock, Sylvia realised that it had been slightly indelicate to do so when in fact she knew about the very open-minded arrangement that Mary had come to with her one-time fiancé the previous year only through the newspapers and law reports, rather than through the direct confidence of her friend. Mary and she had been close friends since childhood, as much from proximity as from natural tastes and inclinations - the world of the aristocracy being after all an extremely small one - but Mary had never been the confiding sort.

Mary was saved from replying by Laura, who after all was only 20, interjecting with shining eyes and clasped hands "Oh, but I can't abide the thought of marrying without the strongest and most passionate love, even adoration, on both sides!"

"Don't worry, old thing", Sylvia told her sister affectionately. "There's plenty of time for you to find a wealth of adoration and marry it, as long as it's bundled up in the person of a Viscount. Sorry, Mary", she added, after a pause. "I was forgetting your socialist sympathies. Or have you thrown all that up now?"

"Well," Mary replied in the considered tone which contrasted starkly with her old manner of speaking, but which were the legacy left upon her character by the events of six months ago, "it still seems to me that our country is riddled with ridiculous injustices, which we should all act to dismantle - even those of us who benefit by them. Particularly us, probably. But I _do _no longer think that revolutionary action is the right way. Our society should reward hard work of all types, of course, and by everyone - not just rich, educated men. I feel now that the true changes will be brought about by the work of men who start from poor beginnings and who work their way up, through their own resolution and perseverance, to higher things, and who then quietly change the system so that others like them can succeed. What could be nobler, more praiseworthy, than that?"

Sylvia and Laura were looking oddly at her as she finished this increasingly impassioned speech, which was, she supposed, a strange topic for a bridal party on the a beautiful May morning. At length, Laura shrugged and said "I've never heard someone talk about politics sounding so much as though they were talking about love."

"Talking of which," Mary responded, "talking of the diamonds, I mean, have the policemen who are to guard them arrived yet? One of them is a friend of Peter's who was so helpful over all that fuss we had last year, and I'd like to say hello."

"Oh, one of Peter's tame policemen", Sylvia said with a laugh. "Your brother is such a scream. Yes, heaps of them have been all over the house since the diamonds arrived from the bank. Which is Peter's? Though those sorts of people all look the same to me."

Bristling imperceptibly, Mary went over to the door. "I might just go and see if I can spot him, then", she said.

At that moment, there was a cry from the room next door, where an assortment of other bridesmaids were dressing, and maids milling around. Sylvia's cousin (also Mary's second cousin once removed) Amelia came running in, holding an enormous empty silver casket. Amelia's face was such a picture of horror that at first Mary thought it was a silly joke when she screeched "Your grandmother's diamonds! Sylvia, they've ... they've _gone!" _Sylvia was initially admirably calm. But all the other bridesmaids came pouring into the room like spilled wine from a bottle, several crying, one shrieking and two wringing their hands, and the hysteria was, as always, catching. In seconds the troupe of silk and lace-clad maidens was thundering down the stairs with Sylvia in the lead, now genuinely distraught at the thought of what her mother and grandmother would say, if not by the loss of the diamonds themselves, crying in deeply tragic tones, "The diamonds! They're stolen! They're gone!"

In a trice, the palatial ground floor of the Park Lane house seemed to contain far, far more people than it could hold, although that could have been because everyone was rushing about so frantically and making so much noise that they each seemed to count as at least three people. Mary scanned the breakfast room for Mr Parker, and winced as she saw him being shrieked at by Sylvia's ashen-faced mother. Then a surge of servants, some of them also wringing their hands, got in between them and she lost him from view.

She stood on tip toe in a way that, had she stopped to reflect, she might have considered beneath her dignity, so that she could see over the heads of the servants and Sylvia's pair of bald uncles, as Mr Parker walked calmly into the room and somehow, without raising his voice, brought it to a hush. "Your grace," he said to Sylvia's mother, who was clinging furiously onto his arm. "There is no cause for alarm. Our measures have been taken and we have the criminals - and the gems..." He went on to explain to a rapt audience that Peter had tipped him off that there was something up with the Dowager Duchess's new maid, but Mary was only half listening. She was thinking affectionately that nobody else in that room would for a second have referred to the diamonds, literally almost priceless, as "gems", or so clearly consider their recovery to be of secondary importance to catching the criminals. Together with everyone else watching, she gasped with horror as the apprehended criminal pulled out a gun from under her clothes with a sleight of handsome quick that the watchers hardly noticed what was happening, and sighed with relief and delight as Mr Parker with an even suddener motion, and hardly pausing in what he was saying, snapped it from her hands and firmly pocketed it. Whilst Peter and the criminal - unmasked as a man, to everyone's apparent horror but secret scandalised joy - engaged in some repartee, Mary moved out from behind the servants and uncles. She caught Mr Parker's eye at once and she saw him, for all his quickness, check too late his instinctive reaction of an eager smile and, for reasons unclear but upon which she would speculate at great length in the privacy of her room that night, a slight flush. He turned it into a brief but respectful nod of the kind that a person makes when they would like to tip their hat to you but lack either or both the hat or the free hands to do so. She beamed back at him. For long seconds she felt they were the only people in the room, and she wished very much she had been able to talk to him before the attempted theft had occurred, for now he would have to take the tiresome criminal to the police station.

Two constables came and took charge of the criminal, who seemed oddly not at all embarrassed at having been unmasked. The crowd of English aristocrats were quite taken aback by this: it was one thing, surely, for a criminal to show no shame or contrition at having his villainy exposed. That was to be expected, even. But they simply could not fathom a man standing before a assembled company of any kind, let alone such an august one, wearing women's clothes and showing no sign of abject humiliation. The uncles next to Mary tutted and mumbled. As Mr Parker followed the constables and the criminals to the panda car waiting outside, she slipped through the crowded room and walked through the hall next to him.

"Mr Parker! I know you haven't time to chat," she began, and then stopped for really, what had she to say? She had only wanted to be near him.

"Sadly not, Lady Mary", he replied, with the gruffness she had come, over the course of the infrequent but wholly delightful dinners they had had together over the last few months, as an indication of embarrassment. "May I ring you up next week?"

"Please do," she said, matching his formal tone and conscious of the proximity of his subordinates, but touching him briefly on the arm with her silk-gloved hand. He got into the car next to the would-be jewel thief and shut the door. Then he leaned out of the open window and said, ignoring the impudently knowing smirk on the face of the prisoner, "I've never seen you look lovelier, Lady Mary. Drive on, Hopkins!"

Mary walked back into the house, smiling. Inside Sylvia, who was surrounded by friends and relatives and holding the diamonds which had been retrieved from the thief's accomplice and restored to the bosom of the family, looked up, caught Mary's eye, and winked. Mary blushed, laughing a little. She had never understood Sylvia's reputation for stupidity.


	3. 3

_Author's note: this story takes place in September 1925, almost a year after "Clouds of Witness" and eighteen months before "Unnatural Death". It's a dead time for Charles/Mary action in the texts, and although the very helpful chronology on a website called points out that several of the stories in "Lord Peter Views the Body" take place between the two novels, none of these seem to offer any scope to reasonably insert any Charles/Mary references. So I've gone off on a bit of a frolic of my own, so to speak..._

Lady Mary was curled up in one of the many chairs to be found at Duke's Denver which was ancient and valuable rather than commodious, leafing thoughtfully through a book of William Morris patterns. She had contrived to make herself comfortable by twisting her body at an unusual angle which tilted her head away from the rest of the room and hadn't noticed her sister-in-law addressing her. When Helen said her name a second time, with the sharpness of annoyance overlaying her habitual, more general, sharpness, Mary raised her golden shingled head in acknowledgment.

"I _said", _Helen continued, "that Mrs Pettigrew has written to me with most unfavourable reports of things she has heard and seen in Town over the past few weeks."

"Oh dear," murmured Mary, turning back to her book. "The summer so often is a silly time at the theatres and concert-halls. I believe the National has a very good autumn programme this year, though, so things may look up for her." Mary was no lover of Mrs Pettigrew, and thought it quite generous of her to take even this amount of interest in that lady's satisfaction in her life.

"I don't mean at the theatre, Mary", Helen said. Having started the conversation sounding so annnoyed she could scarcely sound more so, but her face, had Mary cared to look at it, conveyed a marked increase in displeasure. "She writes," the Duchess of Denver continued, "that you have been seen dining with that policeman friend of Peter's not once or twice, but three times in the last few weeks and also", Helen lowered her voice, although she and Mary were alone in the cavernous room, apart from the servants, about whom neither of them ever minded, "also, parading around Regents Park and rolling around in the grass with him."

Mary was always annoyed members of her family referred to Charles Parker as "that friend of Peter's", feeling that if anyone had earned the right to be considered a friend to the whole family, it was him. But Helen's description made her shake with laughter. She very nearly remarked that the chance would have been a fine thing, for Charles's respectability was beginning to get her down.

"You've missed out several lunches, Helen" she observed instead. "And the day at Regents Park wasn't at all like that - trust Mrs Pettigrew to turn a sunny afternoon in the park with a friend into something squalid. What happened was, we'd been engaged to dine on the Thursday evening, only Mr Parker had been called away urgently. That sort of thing often happens to him, of course. He wasn't free again until Saturday, and that was the evening I was due to go down to stay with the Frobishers. He sent to ask if we could meet in the afternoon, and so we did, of course, and it was so warm and sunny - quite the warmest August that I remember - that we walked in the park. I should hardly have called it a parade.

And of course everyone else in London was there too, so there wasn't a bench to be had. We sat on the grass under a linden tree and talked, and Mr Parker, who I later learned hadn't been to bed since he'd been called away in the middle of Wednesday night, fell asleep, the poor lamb. I sat and demurely read the book that he had in his pocket - a commentary on St Paul's letters to the Phillipains - and very useful reading it was too. You must have noticed how much more intelligent conversation I had with the vicar yesterday than I generally do. Ch- Mr Parker often reads books like that."

Mary smiled, thinking about it. She thought of how, when a game of tag that some particularly noisy children were playing nearby had veered too close to them and woken him up, Charles had been horrified at his bad manners in falling asleep in her company. She had cheerfully remarked that it was the only way in the world she would ever have sat through an entire volume on the letters of St Paul, so it had done her a heap of good. She had gone on to be so horrified and concerned when she found out how long he had gone without sleep that he was presently reconciled to what had happened. As he sat up, he had said gruffly "Well, at any rate, Lady Mary -"

"Mary", she had admonished him sternly, not for he first time. "Otherwise I shall have to start calling you Mr Parker again."

"Mary," he amended sheepishly. "If I live to be one hundred, I shall never forget waking up to your face." And he gave her his arm and they walked back through the late summer rose bushes of Regents Park.

Mary's smile turned to a sigh as she reflected that he could wake up to her face every single morning, if only he would propose marriage to her. She had decided several months ago that she would marry him when he asked her, and hang the money and the class difference. She had prepared in her head a defence of her decision in preparation for the inevitable outcry from her family and friends, and she was ready to explain that he was good and and clever and decent and he made her feel both safe and surprisingly capable. All this was true; although in her heart she knew that the decision owed at least as much to her physical response to him. The solid power of his figure and the roughness of his hands thrilled her in a way that she couldn't explain, but which was connected to the certainty both that he could easily completely overpower her at any time, and that she could trust him completely.

But weeks and months had gone by, during which she had given him as much encouragement as she thought she reasonably could without shocking him, and still he had said nothing. He continued to ask her to dine regularly, to appear to be delighted with her company, and to look at her as they said good night in a way that, though respectful, somehow made her feel that she had no clothes on at all. But other than finally calling her, hesitantly, by her name and not her title, he had made no move to change the nature of their relationship. _Could _she have been wrong about his intentions? It was a problem which vexed her thoughts significantly. Her pride baulked at asking Peter, and no other avenue for assistance suggested itself to her.

"Considering, if nothing else, what I owe to Mr Parker - what we _all _owe him, Helen - I don't see why I shouldn't keep up a friendship with him, just as Peter does."

"My dear Mary," Helen replied in tones that made Mary feel distinctly un-dear, "surely you must see that what is barely suitable in the case of Peter is not suitable at all in yours. Almost a year has passed since that unfortunate business we had last year and you do your prospects real harm by being seen so openly with such a man. Why, Mrs Pettigrew said she didn't dare to stop because of the sheer impossibility of socially acknowledging a man of that quality."

"It sounds as though Mr Parker were asleep when she saw us," Mary snapped back, "so she would hardly have been required to acknowledge him. In any case, I'm more than happy to forego any prospects which may come through a connection Mrs Pettigrew."

"Gerald said that you would be tiresome when I told him I must speak to you," Helen replied in a martyred voice.

"You are to be congratulated, I suppose, Helen" Mary spat out, spitefully, "on having found married life so wholly agreeable that you wish nothing more than to urge everybody else into the same blissful state." How completely satisfying it would have been to look her sister-in-law in the eyes and coolly declare that she was marrying Charles Parker, come hell or high water. She began to feel positively angry with Charles for not having afforded her the opportunity to love him so nobly.

Helen gave no sign that she had heard Mary's words. "One of the party of friends Gerald is bringing down today is Rory Belbroughton of the Worcestershire Belbroughtons. The elder son. He's been in Rhodesia for some years, but he's returned for good, I understand. We're very much hoping you'll be particularly civil to him."

"Helen, I hope you feel that you can rely on me to be civil to any of your friends," Mary replied briefly, deciding that wilful misunderstanding her sister-in-law's particular meaning was her only hope to avoid an out-and-out row. "And I hope that I can rely on you to do the same with mine." With that she disentangled herself from the chair, smoothed down her skirt and jumper, and swept out of the room.

All the same, when Gerald and his party of four friends arrived, full of bonhomie and high hopes for the shooting season, and Rory Belbroughton turned out to be a pleasant and personable enough young man, Mary _was _nice to him. Rather nicer, she had to admit, than she would have been if Charles Parker has been more forthcoming to her. What else, after all, was she to do?


	4. 4

_Author's Note: The line in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" of which Charles is really thinking towards the end of this chapter is of course "Ah love, let us be true to one another!"_

Detective-Inspector Parker walked slowly down the rainy London street. He had started the day at the long and chilly exhumation of a body in which he was interested. Any grim satisfaction he had felt in being proved right when his suspicions in relation to its cause of death were confirmed had soon disintegrated as the day wore on. The cold, dank day had passed in the inquiries connected to the body, all leading to discoveries and interviews of the most squalid kind and, what's more, thus far no arrest. Weary in body and spirit, he headed home.

As he walked through the dark evening streets of Bloomsbury, a nearby church bell began to ring. In six days it would be Christmas. Charles began to feel that an evening service would soothe his mind admirably, and directed his steps towards the tolling bell. Although it was only six o clock, the streets were winter-black and foggy (not another pea-souper setting in, he thought to himself - for though he would never consider himself a Londoner he had allowed certain cockney phrases into his idiom, if only in his head) and he bowed his head slightly as one must when walking into the rain. In consequence he walked straight into a tall, slender figure in a long grey coat and a grey hat.

"I beg your pardon", he began with impersonal politeness, and had already started walking again when he recognised the voice which was murmuring its own apologies, and looked closer at what he could see of the face by the light of the nearest gas lamp.

"Lady Mary!" he exclaimed, instinctively taking both her gloved hands in his, and then immediately cursing himself for the indiscretion. It seemed that despite all that had passed between them, or more to the point all that _hadn't _passed between them, his heart's response to seeing her was, still, one of pleasure.

"Mr Parker!" Mary smiled at him, although they both felt suddenly rather crestfallen as, at the same time, they realised they had fallen back into using formal address and were not likely to easily recover the lost ground in their hard won intimacy. "I'm so dreadfully glad to have bumped into you. What luck that we did! We might so easily have missed each other in this frightful murkiness."

"It's fine luck", Charles agreed. "Where are you off to? May I escort you?"

"I'm staying with a friend in Fitzroy. At least, I'm not really staying as a friend. Mrs Hemshawe has a town house there. She's just inherited it - or her husband has, I mean, but it comes to the same thing - and all the decoration is completely impossible because the elder Mrs Hemshawe hadn't let a thing be changed in forty-five years. My task is to redesign all the inside so that Mr Hemshawe doesn't feel his mother's tastes are being derided, and Mrs Hemshawe can feel at home and be proud of it. It's proving a delicate balance" she finished, laughing. The lamp light was shining on her and away from Charles, so she couldn't see his face, and as he made no reply, she had no way to gage his reaction.

"It all sounds rather silly, I suppose, compared to stopping smugglers and catching burglars and all those things", she added, rather sadly.

"We don't get so many smugglers in London these days," Charles smiled down at her, and she could hear the affection in his voice. "But I'm having one of those days where it rather feels that crime isn't all it's cracked up to be: and there's nothing trivial about making peoples homes happy and attractive, to my mind. I say, you're getting awfully wet."

"So must you be," Mary pointed out, cheerfully. "I've been ice-skating at the rink, you see, with some friends, but I didn't want to stay any longer. I couldn't find a taxi when I'd finished, and I thought I'd walk but I lost my way. I'd probably have perished in this rotten fog if you hadn't saved me! Were you going anywhere important? If you weren't then I'd be so grateful if you could take me back to Mrs Hemshawe's. It's a funny time of evening, but I'm sure she'll give us some tea."

"I'd be delighted," Charles said a little stiffly. He decided it was easier to avoid saying her name at all than try to recapture the lost intimacy of "Mary", or admit bitter defeat by continuing with "Lady Mary". "I'd been on my way home when I heard the bells ringing at Christ the King over there, so I was just heading in on a bit of a whim. It's been a pretty grimy day, all things considered. But, of course, walking with you will cheer it behind any recognition, far better than any draughty church could do. Let's walk in the right direction, and hail the first cab we see to get out of this beastly rain."

"Snow would be more fitting, wouldn't it?" Mary remarked as Charles took her arm - again, that jolt as her body involuntarily responded to his touch, even such a simple one, and through so very many layers of clothing, as this. She felt suddenly surly and annoyed with him. What business had any man to make a woman feel such things, when he plainly had no intention of doing anything about it? But at the same time, she was seized by a foolish panic that they would find a cab and he would bundle her into it, and that this moment with him, in the dark, would end. She entertained no illusions for a second that he would allow himself to be invited into tea in Fitzrovia.

"May I come with you to church?" she suggested, surprising herself as the words came out of her mouth. "I'm not in a hurry and, draughty or not, at least one assumes it will be dry there. I feel I should like to."

She could feel his hesitation somehow, though he betrayed none in his voice or his step. "If you'd really like to, then of course I'd be delighted", he said, and smoothly steered them round in a semi-circle to start off in the opposite direction. He was carrying her ice-skates by now of course, and they fell to talking of skating. Charles found himself remembering, for the first time in 15 years, the cold, cold winter in his boyhood when the Duddon Estuary had frozen over and he and his friends had skated over it. "Good God!" he said, remembering. "Jack McCarthy went over - it's a wonder we all didn't, our skates were just old boots with blades tied or soldered into them, and we'd none of us skated before or since - and the impact of his fall broke the ice in a thin place, and he went in. We thought it was curtains for him, really. We lay on our stomachs on the ice waving our hands down into the hole till we felt him grab on. The worst of it was that I almost had him safe, and then the weight of his torso as I heaved him up into my arms broke the ice _I _was lying on. Thankfully one of the others was holding me round the waist or that would have been it. Still, I swore that would be my last time on the ice and so it has been. I take my hat off to you, whirling around the treacherous stuff for pleasure."

Mary thought that the difference between skating on a shallow and well-curated rink near Kings Cross on expensive fitted skates and the skating of Charles's youth went without saying, so she didn't remark on it. Instead she said "I love to hear you talk about your childhood", it being far easier to say things of that nature when it's too dark to see the other person's face.

"I suppose it would have a sort of exoticism, being so different from your own," Charles agreed, mildly and without any rancour. But "oh, no, that's not what I mean!" Mary protested. "I find it simply fascinating to imagine you as a boy. I imagine you completely the same and utterly changed. like most of us, I suppose." Charles didn't seem to have any answer to make to this, and indeed, she reflected, what right had he given her to imagine his childhood at all? So she continued in a bright, social tone, hating the artificial sound of her voice as it rang in her own ears. "Will you be going back to Barrow-in-Furness for Christmas?"

"The police force is a rotten career to chose when you're thinking of holidays," Charles replied, lightly. "We can't all be off at Christmas, naturally, and this year my luck was out. What will you do, Lady Mary?"

Curses, he had said her title again. And his heart sank further as she answered him. "I'm summoned down to Denver, where there'll be a party for New Year's Day. It's a bore, but I've no excuse not to go."

Did she sound slightly evasive, all of a sudden? Charles's detective ear was not often wrong on these points. Abruptly, he said "My mother sent me a clipping from one of the society newspapers with a picture of you at Cannes over the summer. She likes to follow all the family's doings." This was true, but Mrs Parker was a shrewd women and although her son was not communicative about his personal life, such as it was, she had gleaned enough to make her take a particular interest in the doings of the youngest of the Wimsey siblings in particular.

"Oh yes, I had rather a decadent summer. I'm not one for sailing, really, but a friend of mine had quite a fleet this year, so we-"

"Mr Belbroughton? Yes, the paper said so. It contained a number of very jolly photos." Charles had burned the photos savagely in the grate of his bedroom, and then written kindly to his mother to thank her for taking an interest and to remark that it was always nice to see one's friends enjoying themselves. But it had not been nice to see the pictures, of course, and although so swiftly burned they were still imprinted on his mind, in particular the one with Lady Mary in an evening gown with the arm of a smart and smug gentleman that the newspaper identified as Mr Belbroughton around her waist. Charles had looked Mr Belbroughton up in _Who's Who _when dining with Peter later that week, under the pretence of idly turning it over whilst Peter played the piano after dinner. Mr Belbroughton was revealed as coming from a very old and very good family with several links with the aristocracy, and as being vastly rich, and Charles had slept poorly for many days afterwards.

"Yes, well, one has to do something, after all", Mary remarked, acidly. It was on the tip of her tongue to scream at him that she'd much rather have been in stuffy London darning a policeman's socks but that the policeman in question hadn't been forthcoming. She wondered wildly whether she could lure him into some private space, and entice him into "taking advantage of her". Then he'd jolly well _have _to marry her. She could have wept with frustration as she felt the year's work of hardening her heart to him, of convincing herself along with everyone else that she had long forgotten that she had ever cared for him, crumble away into nothing.

In this unsuitable frame of mind they arrived at the church of Christ the King. "I think I'd really better take you home, Lady Mary", Charles said as they reached the steps. He felt a thrill of sardonic, masochistic pleasure at saying her title this time. "Mrs Hemshawe will be wondering where you've got to."

"Mrs Hemshawe is quite aware that I'm a sensible, grown woman," replied Mary, "and doubtless she'd be delighted to hear I've been at church. There's more reason for anyone to be concerned with my moral than my bodily health, I expect." She didn't know why she was anxious to prolongue the encounter, now, given how painful it had turned out to be for both of them. Perhaps it was ouf of sheer stubbornness that she refused to change her mind, and preceded Charles into the church.

These were the days before churches went in for Christmas trees and the like, and when advent was still treated as a severe season of preparation. The church was austerely decorated, but the glow of the candles and the subdued swelling of a good organ embarking on the first verse of "_O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" _created an atmosphere which was perfectly suited to the melancholy yearning which had fallen over Charles Parker.

Orders of service and hymn books were thrust into their hands by a thin man as they entered, and they settled themselves into the end of a pew half way down the nave. It was strangely intimate to take off their hats and gloves (not coats, of course, not in an English church in winter) and lay them alongside each other on the ledge in front of their seats, as well as Mary's skates with a clatter on the tiled floor, and to sing the hymn together. Charles noticed with despair the sweetness of Mary's singing voice which, though gentle, was perfectly pitched. It felt like insult to injury, that she should sing so sweetly on top of everything else, on top of the exquisite lines of her face and body in the candlelight, just when he so desperately needed to light on something which could take the edge off his longing. Mary in turn was struck by how much more Northern Charles's accent was in singing than in speaking. She wondered whether he knew. She found it enchanting, containing as it did more of Charles than the carefully neutral accent he spoke in. Listening to him felt somehow like being enveloped in a good warm cloak against the cold. She sat closer to him throughout the service than perhaps the half-full church really warranted and when they shook hands as the congregation exchanged the sign of the peace, each pretended not to notice that the other's hand was trembling.

Afterwards, they left the church in companionable silence. Mary wondered whether the other members of the congregation had thought they were husband and wife. It gave her a sharp delight to think that they had, as though somehow that made it true in some dimension or other that they were returning together to a quiet dinner in a small and unfashionable house. And then, perhaps, to bed.

Charles couldn't allow himself to have similar thoughts in her presence, or in a public place. He looked resolutely about for a taxi as they walked away from the church. The rain had stopped and the fog was dispersing as quickly as it had come, opening the skies to a clear and cold night.

"Let's just walk, Mr Parker", Mary said. "Surely it can't be that far, and I do feel so restored by my devotions."

"It's half an hour's brisk walk", Charles replied non-committally, but they started walking all the same. "Were they really devotions? We've never talked about religion but I'd a fancy you weren't really so very much for it."

"No", said Mary thoughtfully. "I suppose I grew up thinking that it was rather sick-making to take anything like that seriously, you know, and then the war when I was little more than a child made me feel as though nothing really could have meaning. I've always felt a bit _Dover Beach _about it, though the tradition and the ritual has its own loveliness."

"The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of faith", Charles mused aloud, mostly to distract himself from the line in the poem of which he was really thinking. "Yes. An unwavering faith seems to me pretty well impossible for an intelligent person to have these days - I suppose it may always have been. Perhaps every generation likes to think it has an exclusive scoop on human misery. But my view has always been that one can choose to believe in something that one considers worthy and good - not in police work, of course" he interrupted himself, suddenly, "that would be catastrophic- but in theology, one can and for some purposes, the act of choosing makes it true. And the actual story of redemption and the ultimate victory of love, once you've taken away all the trappings of the church, is something to exult in. Even if one has no proof that it's literally true, the fact that men have created the story, and yearn to believe it - well, I think it means something. Perhaps a policeman must have a faith to counteract all the evil and squalour he has to contend with. If he didn't think that the world was, ultimately, good then he'd be driven to drink." He finished with a self-deprecating shrug, painfully aware that in Mary's circles talking seriously about religion was considered shockingly bad form.

"That the world is ultimately good", Mary repeated. "When I'm with you I can believe it", she added in a low voice.

They had both stopped walking without realising it, and on the encouragement of her words and with the vertiginous feeling of a man walking off a great precipice, Charles realised that he had reached breaking point and, though he was not in general a man given to melodrama, he felt that he must take her in his arms or die.

The blast of a motor car horn feet away from them sounded like a foghorn in their ears. "Were you stopping for a taxi, Guv'nor?" a cheerful voice said from inside the car. "'Op in, then."

For a second Charles's brain registered the man's words as though they were in a foreign language. It was Mary who said , in a strained and high-pitched voice "a taxi? Oh yes! How funny! We were at one point looking for a taxi."

"'Op in, then", repeated the driver, beginning to regret having stopped for these people who he could only assume were drunk. They did. They sat in miserable silence all the way to Fitzrovia, unable to look at each other. Upon drawing up outside Mrs Hemshawe's splendid house, Mary said sadly "I suppose you won't come in?", but it was really a statement rather than a question. Charles handed her out of the car with a quiet chivalry and replied only "Merry Christmas, Mary."

She stood on the doorstep, watching him get heavily back into the taxi, and drive away. "Merry Christmas, Charles", she said, softly.

Charles allowed the taxi to drive him two streets away, and then paid him off and began his long walk home. When he got to his lodgings in Great Ormond Street he sat down in a chair and wept.

It was a shame that he couldn't know that when the party of guests arrived at Denver for New Year, Lady Mary did not submit or respond to the embraces of Rory Belbroughton as she had intended to. She found that her heart simply wasn't in it, somehow. Mr Belbroughton took his ring and his proposal back home with him when he left a week later.


	5. 5

_Author's Note: This chapter takes place immediately after the end of the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, and immediately before the beginning of The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba. There are some excellent Parker scenes in the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, including the lovely description of his friendship with Peter which ends "Parker was the one person who was never irritated by Wimsey's mannerisms, and Wimsey repaid him with a genuine affection foreign to his usually detached nature". I hoped to capture something of that spirit here._

Detective-Inspector Charles Parker had, in his quiet and equable way, known that he had been in the running for promotion for at least two years. He was not overburdened with the sort of imagination which leads a man to revel in anticipated glory, but when his work on the business that he and his colleagues affectionately referred to as "the Crate Mystery" had ended in such a satisfactory manner, it had been impossible not to start thinking seriously about what promotion might mean for him. And although not given to displays of emotion, he had been unable to conceal considerable satisfaction on the news of his chief-instepctorship being officially imparted.

"You know, I never had you down as particularly ambitious for glory and riches", Detective-Inspector Dorrige had remarked curiously, as they toasted Parker's success in the Rose and Crown, a public house near Scotland Yard much beloved of the constabulary. "You've always struck me as having beer tastes to go along with a detective-inspector's beer income."

"Well, every man wants to feel his work has been recognised and that he's moving up to more meaty things, I suppose," Parker responded. "But you're right - for my own part, anyway, I'd certainly drink beer over champagne any day of the week." They both drank, appropriately, to that.

Dorridge was not the Yard's second best detective-inspector (shortly to be the best, once Parker could no longer be numbered in that rank) for nothing and he didn't miss the clue to Parker's happiness in that sentence. "For your own part, eh?" he said, meaningly. "So there _is _a woman, and one with expensive tastes. Damn it, that means I owe Curry five bob. He said that nobody could be as bloody respectable as you unless they had a bit of skirt on the go somewhere."

Parker bristled. He wondered whether he would have objected so strongly to the expression if the lady who, although in no sense "on the go" was the one to whom his thoughts had immediately flown upon learning that he was to have an income upon which dependents could be kept to what he hoped she might consider a decent standard, had been anyone else. He supposed that every man saw the object of his love as uniquely worthy of respect, but he recoiled from hearing Lady Mary referred to, even obliquely, as "a bit of skirt" with genuine revulsion, as if he had seen a chapel desecrated.

He responded mildly, though. "You can keep your five bob. I've nobody on the go. But maybe with a chief-inspectorship, I could think about starting someone up."

Dorridge wasn't fooled. He was older than Parker by only a few years, but he considered himself to be far the more worldly-wise, at least insofar as matters of the heart were concerned. "Pull the other one, it's got bells on it," he scoffed, more or less automatically. "I know a man hopelessly in love when I see one, and I've been seeing one at your desk for a few years now."

Dorridge eyed Parker critically over his beer and then said more seriously- and it was a mark if his affection that he did so, for seriousness was an attitude which the jovial Dorridge was not fond of adopting - "Though if you want my opinion, any woman that wouldn't take you on your old salary isn't worth having now. I keep my wife and children welll enough on it, don't I? The embrace of a woman who won't have a man on a lesser salary seems to me like it'd be a pretty cold one in the long run, that's all."

Parker grinned at his friend, appreciating the kindly impulse rather than the actual advice. How to explain to Dorridge that whilst his advice was sound in general, to offer a hand that would have meant living with no servants could only be an insult to an aristocratic woman who grew up on a ducal estate? He was not at all sure that even with his improved income he wouldn't be insulting her by offering his hand, but he felt that his resolution had been slowly crumbling under the weight of his unshakeable longing for her over the preceding four years, and that to wait any longer was more than he could bear.

"I'll bear that in mind as I weigh up my options in respect of my entirely hypothetical lady friends", he said lightly. "A man hopelessly in love my foot. How d'you know I haven't just got chronic indigestion? Come on, you old goat. I'll stand you another." And they went to the bar.

When Parker returned to Great Ormond Street a few hours later - a home for which he felt a surging fondness now that there might be (though he hardly dared to believe it) some prospect of exchanging it for another - Lord Peter Wimsey was waiting in Parker's sitting room, reading a book from Parker's shelves and sipping a glass of whisky. Lord Peter laid down Parker's well-thumbed copy of "Eschatology and Evangelism" with an expression of something like relief, and rose at his friend's entrance.

"Sorry to start without you, and all that" he said, gesturing to the whisky. Parker looked at the bottle on the table - a very fine whisky which had he knew with certainty not been there when he left that morning, not least because it was of such a calibre and vintage that its cost would have set him back to the tune of a month's salary. He raised an eyebrow.

"I thought you'd prefer it to champagne, but dash it all! _Some _celebration is called for when a fellow rises gloriously up the ranks. I'm sorry I didn't take proper notice when you first mentioned it. In my defence, m'lud, I can only say that you're so far the soundest chap in the force that I tend to forget you're not already the Commissioner, don't you know."

Lord Peter smiled an engaging smile at his friend, and Parker grinned back. They had come unnervingly close to falling out over the Bellona Club business which had just concluded, and Parker correctly interpreted the gesture as at least partly an apology.

"I say, old man, I wish you'd called on Mrs Munns to make you up a decent fire," he reproved Lord Peter. The flat had impressed him with its faded Georgian proportions when he first came to it, but draughts thrived under the high ceilings and it was as chilly a night as could be expected on the last day of November. Parker sternly stopped his thoughts in their tracks, as his mind began to ask itself whether Lady Mary would be likely to prefer high ceilings or effective insulation in any future home he might consider.

"She offered when she let me in - which she did with a gloriously begrudging air, by the way. That woman is a treasure. I had to assure her I'm not such a gilded lily as to be unable to light a fire myself, if it came to that. But anyway, I didn't think you'd be nearly long enough to make it worthwhile." In truth, Lord Peter had not cared to make inroads into the meagre supply of coal lying in the coal scuttle.

"I was walking back from the Yard - well, from the public house by it - but I'd've hailed a cab if only I'd known you were waiting", Parker replied warmly, and Lord Peter smiled as he replied. "I should hate to interfere with your mania for walking everywhere, Charles. How else would you maintain your physique?"

"I daresay the regular routine of chasing after criminals and scrambling through windows will do the trick", Parker replied, lightly. Both men knew full well that Parker's habit of walking any distance that could be walked was born of the exegencies of modest means and careful habits rather than kinisthenic zeal, although the result was a frame which, though solidly built, was muscular and strong with no hint of running to fat.

"Well, let's dine. A beer-lined stomach is no fit receptacle for the 1892 Macallan Malt."

Parker agreed, on the proviso that the menu should include no snails. By the time they returned to Great Ormond Street, they were mellow with good food, good wine and the pleasure of conversation and restored affection.

They sat companionably before the fire - which of course Parker made up himself - puffing on their pipes and drinking whisky in long appreciative sips. Parker held Lord Peter absorbed by telling him in great detail about a series of high value and high profile burglaries which had been occurring up and down the country for a few years and which, although they appeared to be unconnected, niggled at him in a way that he could only describe as "having that smell about them."

"You know what I mean," he added after another contemplative puff. "Nothing to connect em on the face of it and they're all over the place - last one was up in Northumberland and before that it was an estate in Devon. And the blighters are much too careful to leave anything behind. But if I were the master of my own time, I'd be tempted to see what I could sniff out."

Lord Peter nodded thoughtfully. He had read about the burglaries and had thoughts of his own in their regard. He asked many and detailed questions, in particular about what the Yard had found out in relation to the burglaries in London. "Precious little", Parker admitted, "which is one of the things that points to a bigger, sophisticated outfit unifying the whole thing." He gave Lord Peter all the details he had. A gang was officially suspected in respect of the London burglaries, though nobody much at the Yard yet gave Parker's theories of a wider net much credence. Lord Peter's questions were many and detailed, but then, his ability to be curious and intelligent about things which could semingly hold little interest for him was one of the things which made him such a good interlocutor, to Parker's way of thinking. There were plenty of other people, of course, who considered it a characteristic rather to be deplored than admired. "We've been after the gang for four years, on and off ," Parker concluded. "It's not really my case - or not yet. Perhaps I'll be allowed to work on whatever I choose from now on. If I do, I'll bring you in on anything interesting, of course."

They fell into the companionable silence of two men long accustomed to each other's company, and of whom neither felt the urge to impress the other. But at length Parker spoke, and it was in a tentative voice very different from his usual forthright manner.

"I say, Peter. When we were talking last week about the Dorland woman, there was something that you said -"

"Oh, I can't be answerable for anything I may have said in connection with that beastly case," Lord Peter said, airily. "Unreservedly apologise for any offence occasioned and all that. Will that do?"

"Well, not quite," Parker replied, slowly. "Because, you see, it was to do with - that is to say, I should hate you to think that in connetion with - or in any situation, of course - well, in any case, I-"

Lord Peter stared at him. "For an articulate man, you're doing a remarkable impression of a blithering idiot. If we are to have what I believe the ladies' magazines refer to as a "heart to heart" about something then I wish you'd spit it out, Charles. It makes it awfully difficult to join in when one hasn't a clue what the topic is, don't you know."

Charles swallowed and continued doggedly, although flushing a dull red. "It was in the context of a discussion about our views towards women. You said - well, the clear inference to be drawn from what you said, was that I wouldn't understand women or know how to view them as human beings, you know."

"I'm honoured to know that my words have made such an impression on you, old boy", Lord Peter said with a gentle irony. "I remember the conversation, and unless I'm much mistaken the inference to be drawn from what you said to _me _was that I put myself in the position to understand a good deal too much about women, which on some constructions is rather more damning."

"It's not a question of what's more damning," Parker replied, his voice carefully neutral. "It's just - I mean, one doesn't have to be a man about town to have had some experience, in various ways, with - and then, I mean, it's not as though there aren't plenty of female suspects and even policewomen when one -"

"Good Lord, Charles," Lord Peter said, smothering an affectionate smile. "It wasn't intended as a schoolboy taunt about lack of experience. Indeed for all I know you've several women friends with whom your acquaintance is of an intimacy to make even an old bon viveur like myself blush - not that that would be anything to boast of, in itself, what."

Lord Peter ended his sentence in some confusion, slightly unnerved by the direction their conversation had taken. They had discussed many matters in the course of their friendship, from the banal to the metaphysical, but they had never discussed women in these terms, and both were beginning to feel that it had been very much better that they kept it that way.

But Parker persisted. "Yes, of course. But I shouldn't want you to think that I wouldn't know how to treat - that I should be the type to put a girl on a pedestal and then resent her being human, you know. I mean, if a chap falls in love with - with anyone in the full knowledge that her past might be sort of, well, chequered isn't the right word but you see what I mean, then he's not the sort of chap to refuse to accept humanity in all its weaknesses in her - in anyone - indeed, I should say he's the sort to love her all the more fiercely for them-"

Understanding began to dawn on Lord Peter's whisky-muddled head. "No indeed, Charles," he said seriously. "I wouldn't have thought it of him - of this chap, I mean, whoever he is. Jolly fine fellow, by the sounds of things, what. More power to his elbow. Mind you, I _did _think you were prejudiced against Miss Dorland, you know, because she wasn't the kind of woman you found sympathetic. But aren't we all? And I daresay she was prejudiced against you on account of a distaste for being interviewed by the police, you know, and so she came across badly. I'm prejudiced against plenty of people, you know - men more than women, I suspect, but we've already said as much about my penchant for women as these walls need hear. Just you wait until we get a case with a suspect who's a sniffer, Charles. I'll be gunning for his guilt regardless of the evidence either way and damn me if I don't get the wretch strung up for a crime he was nowhere near on account of his sniff."

Like men reaching the shore after a perilous shipwreck, they both felt considerable relief at the conversation's return to familiar and comfortable lines. The went on to discuss the correlations, or lack thereof, between murderers they had known and irritating personal habits, but they spoke in ever slower and more rambling sentences until they fell asleep in their chairs at last, more or less simultaneously.

Lord Peter's last conscious thought was "I hope I've said enough to get the old idiot to understand I've no objection. Hardly see how I could have been clearer over the years... not sure Mary would see it the same way, but that's his look-out. An interesting idea about the outfit behind the burglaries, anyway. I wonder..." But he had to continue his wonderings the next day, for it was at that point that his eyes closed and his head dropped to his chest.

——————

The next day was Sunday. Charles Parker went quietly to church, had mutton and potatoes for lunch and then sat down to write to Lady Mary Wimsey. It was a letter which he had been longing to write for many years, but which, now that he sat down to write it, caused him great difficulty. He made several attempts and crumpled each one up in disgust half way through until his fire blazed mockingly with the kindling of the many balls of writing paper he threw at it. He growled words which he normally would not use and ran his hand through his dark hair. He paced about the room, and stood at the window looking out onto the darkening early winter sky.

He concentrated on conjuring a picture of her face in his mind's eye- a trick which his good visual memory, honed by his many years as a detective, made easy for him. Her large violet eyes, soft fair hair and the high cheekbones which would have leant her face a certain severity had they not been tempered by that mouth which always seemed to be on the verge of a gentle smile - he could summon them all before him in an instant, and doing so was one of the great pleasures of his life. And yet each time he saw her in the flesh, he was still struck with a force that felt physical by her beauty and by the grace of her body and movements (these he very seldom allowed himself to reproduce in his mind). He contemplated the fact of this for awhile, still needled somehow by the suggestion he had taken from Peter's words that he did not love her as a real, whole woman.

Would he have fallen so deeply in love with her, had she not been so beautiful? Honestly, he imagined not. It _had _been the grace of her movements and the limpid pools of her eyes which had first drawn him in. But if she were to lose her beauty now - to be disfigured in some way, perhaps - would he love her still? He was relieved to find that he could answer himself with no hesitation. Over the years a hundred things - her misplaced bravery over the man Goyles, the mischievous glint in her eye as she teased her brother or Parker himself, her kindness to animals, the gentle humour she contrived to wring out of the most banal situations - had mingled with his admiration of her beauty and the mixture had fermented to become what he now admitted was an insuperable passion. "Well, hang it. Why _shouldn't _a man love a beautiful woman, anyway?" he said aloud, and he sat back down at the table.

The real barrier was of course, still and always, one of class and money. The Chief-Inspector's salary which he would start to receive the following week was far more than he had ever dreamed of earning as a boy, and in some ways it still seemed to him more money than any one man really had a right to. But it wouldn't allow him imitate even a fraction of the style and manner of living at a ducal estate like Denver, or that of Mary's many other aristocratic friends. He sternly told himself that Mary had been a Bolshevik and that she didn't care for such things, but her very bearing was so regal and her clothes so expensive that it was impossible to quite square the circle.

He got up and paced some more. In the end he sternly told himself that only she could say how much weight she afforded to luxury and rank, and that it was cowardly to refuse to put the choice before her. Parker was not vain and he knew he had no particular claims to handsomeness or to great brilliance, but he had enough experience in assessing the quality of evidence to be sure that Lady Mary did _like _him, at least, and seemed to seek out his company much more than his position as a somewhat unlikely friend of her older brother would on its own have merited. He pictured her looking up at him, as she had done so many times as they walked together, and decided that the look he had seen in her eyes on so many occasions had to mean _something._

"If I'm a self-deluding fool, at least I'll know it," he said to himself, sitting down once more and taking up his pen with fresh resolve.

In the end, the letter he sent to Duke's Denver merely said:

_Dear Mary_

_I hope you're well. You may have heard from Peter that I've been promoted to Chief-Inspector - it's rather a big thing for me, and I'd be honoured to celebrate by dining with you when you're next in town. Your company always gives me the grandest pleasure, of course, but this time I'd also like to talk with you about something particular, which I'd rather do in person than by letter._

_Please convey my respectful regards to your mother, and believe me_

_Yours, as ever_

_Charles._

He rose and re-read it criticallly, wondering for one final time whether he was mad to do it face to face. The embarrassment for them both would be almost unthinkable should the answer be what the dominant cautious part of him feared it must - but he would not have her think him a coward. Oh, and if the answer should be yes!

He walked over to the window once again, but night had properly fallen now, and he found himself staring at his own reflection in the glass. He smiled sheepishly at himself, noting the first flecks of grey in his dark hair.

"You bloody old idiot," he told himself. "Don't get your hopes up." With that, he put on his overcoat and set off to the postbox. He had disobeyed his own warning before he had reached the front door.

————-

Many days passed before he received a reply and his hopes had sunk further with each cheerless morning and afternoon's post. When he did receive a letter with Mary's inimitable handwriting on it, he found that his hands trembled so much that he could hardly open it.

_Dear Charles_

_I had heard about your promotion, the day before I received your letter. It was Gerald, of all people, who told me, having read it in the newspaper - I honestly think he believes it's somehow due to your having had the great honour of helping to exonerate him from criminal charges all those years ago!_

_ I'm absolutely thrilled for you of course and it will be a great privilege to celebrate with you and discuss anything that you like. I hadn't planned to be in town until the new year - but I find that I could pop down for a day or so - would the 14th of December be any good? If so, that should just give me time to think of suitably serious conversation to have with so important a personage as a Chief-Inspector! I feel confident that notwithstanding your promotion you will retain the kindness and good humour with which you have always entertained your old friend,_

_Mary._

Parker read this letter through several times, not sure whether to be encouraged or discouraged. If the classification of their relationship as "old friends" hardly chimed with any notion of incipient romance, Mary plainly stated that she was changing her plans and coming to London solely for the purpose of seeing him. Lurching wildly from hope to despair and back again in the space of a minute, he folded the letter neatly and ruminated upon its contents as he took his long, brisk morning walk to the Yard. In any event, only five days remained until the 14th, and the possibility, no matter how remote, that within a week he might be holding Mary in his arms was exhilarating in the extreme. He began seriously to prepare the words he planned to say to her.

Except, of course, within three days the news came in that Lord Peter had been killed shortly after his arrival in Africa. Charles Parker and Lady Mary Wimsey never had their celebratory dinner, Parker never said the words he planned so carefully that day, and nothing was ever the same again.


	6. 6

_Author's Note: Please don't read this chapter, the rest of this author's note, or any subsequent chapters here if you haven't read "Lord Peter Views the Body" and you don't want spoilers for the final story in that volume, "The Adventurous Exploit of the Cave of Ali Baba"._

_We know from the text of the first Lord Peter story, "Whose Body", that Parker and the Dowager Duchess were already friends when the series began, and in this story I've established a strong friendship between Parker and Lady Mary too (the texts neither support this nor rule it out - the first we hear of their interactions after "Clouds of Witness" is that they've been dining together in "Strong Poison"), and this and the next chapter consider how the Dowager Duchess and Lady Mary dealt with the necessity of keeping Peter's actual condition a secret from a man they were friends with, and who must have been visibly battered by grief._

_It's bad times for dear Parker here, but not long before things start to look up for him very dramatically!_

_The Bible verse the Dowager cites in her Christmas Card is the lovely quotation from the Psalms: "Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."_

_—————-_

A long winter followed the news that Lord Peter Wimsey had been killed in Africa. It was a period of Charles Parker's life which he never cared to remember in later years. The early part of the winter was not so bad; indeed, Parker had been unable to believe the news at first, so that he had only to contend with a sense of numbness and confusion, and not with grief, until he received a letter from Lady Mary just before Christmas, very shortly after her return from Africa.

"_Dear Charles_

_We had the funeral in Tanganyika - one has to be quick there because of the heat. There was no room for doubt. I am so very sorry. He was not a man to talk much of these things but I know that your friendship gave Peter very great happiness. We do hope you will come to the memorial service at Denver in January._

_Much love _

_Mary_

It was a short letter, and only the second he had ever received from her. He knew that she would have had to write many similar letters to friends and relations - though he wondered whether she would have stressed that there could be no doubt as to Peter's death in them all. He rather thought that she may have guessed how his mind was turning - that despite all he had seen in his life and career of the senseless indiscriminate greed of death, it still seemed impossible that someone so clever as Peter should die in such a stupid fashion - and that he had latched on to the idea that there may have been a mistake.

He had read it several times, wondering rather that Lady Mary seemed almost to consider that _he _would be the one to need comfort from her, but again, he had seen enough to know that grief takes people in different ways. He noticed almost mechanically that she had signed off with love - a word which had never passed between them before - and was surprised to find that it evoked no emotional response in him. And indeed, over the next few weeks he found that nothing evoked any emotional response in him anymore.

He threw himself into his work, of course, barely eating or sleeping. He no longer felt the winter cold, and frequently walked out on frost-bitten mornings without a coat. He never thought of Lord Peter at all, which of course meant that he could never think of Lady Mary.

But the date of the memorial service was announced in due course, and he must go. Mary sent him a notice about it - a card with the date and time embossed on it, with "_please do come, Charles" _written underneath in her elegant hand. And so on the 21st of January 1929, he found himself in black at the chapel at Duke's Denver. He had several times visited the Dower House, the grandeur of which had made the experience surreal enough for a grammar school boy, but never Duke's Denver itself. Taking in the sheer scale of the place Peter had grown up, the unlikelihood of the friendship which had flourished between them impressed upon Parker anew.

He had an awkward exchange with the Duke and Duchess, who thanked him for coming in a way which suggested they would far rather he hadn't bothered.

He had a much longer conversation with the Dowager Duchess, with whom he had always got on very well and for whom he was unutterably sorry. He was impressed by her fortitude and told her so, and she looked away. He supposed that she, too, could only make it through by not thinking directly of the reason they were there. He pressed her hand and told her, admitting it to himself at last, "I miss him every hour of every day. He was my best friend." He found that his voice cracked towards the end of the sentence, and looked up to see Lady Mary standing behind her mother. She was pale, but her face beneath the fashionable black hat and veil was not strained or etched with grief as it might have been. Her beauty had its usual effect on his heart rate and he realised with a sickly lurch that this was the first thing he had felt for many weeks.

She offered him her hand; he held it in his and didn't let it go. When the memorial service began, it seemed natural for him to sit with Mary and her mother, and although it was clear that the Duchess didn't like it, she appeased her feelings by hissing loudly to those around her "That's the policeman who was such friends with Peter, you know. Such odd friends he always had, and look where it got him in the end," and adopting an expression of sadness tinged with wounded dignity.

The service was short but affecting. Freddie Arbuthnot dissolved into tears and had to be lovingly comforted by Rachel Levy. Charles Parker, being of the class for whom such a show of emotion would be interpreted as weakness rather than sensibility, was as stone throughout. He maintained his composure by thinking of Mary, who had so much more right to grieve than he did, and without intending to, he placed his hand over hers where it rested on the ledge in front of them. She half-looked at him, and moved infinitesimally closer to him in the pew. The touch of her pale, slender fingers beneath his large hands was distraction enough from his grief - indeed, he almost despised himself for feeling the familiar surge of delight at her very existence, and the accompanying surge of desire, well up inside him, despite the circumstances.

After the service was finished the party walked slowly and sadly to the Great Hall at Denver for refreshments. Parker lost sight of Mary and was talked to at great length by a man who introduced himself as Paul Delagardie, an uncle who had clearly loved Peter very much and whose manner of proving it was to tell Parker in great detail about the many romantic adventures that Peter had had under the tutelage of Paul himself. Parker nodded politely at regular intervals at this wildly unsuitable funeral chat. He looked desperately around for some means of escape, reflecting that after all, aristocrats were really quite unfathomable.

Eventually, a raised eyebrow and a quirk of the head on the part of M Delagardie caused Parker to glance behind him, where he saw Mary standing with a faint smile on her face. "Don't listen to anything that Oncle Paul has been telling you, Charles," she said lightly, "about me or Peter. He makes half of it up as he goes along. Listen, Peter left you some books. They're in the library - would you like to take them now, or at least look at them?"

Parker expressed his willingness to do so with an eagerness that might have offended the old man; but M Delagardie merely smiled serenely and said "A very sensible young man, this, Mary. I like him and suspect deep passion beneath the stolid exterior."

Parker was horrified, and felt his face flush as he followed Mary out of the room and through a seemingly endless succession of halls. She walked with her usual swift grace, and he was acutely aware of the lines of her body as she moved. He thought, as he had often thought before, that he had never seen anyone more wholly and exquisitely feminine.

"I say, you'll have to stay with me," he told her as they turned around yet another corner, making a good stab at keeping his voice normally friendly. "I'd never find my way out without you."

She didn't turn her head, but replied softly, "Of course I'll stay with you, Charles."

There was about her tone something which rendered him unable to reply. He had never before been alone with her in so secluded a place, and his feelings on realising this threatened to drown out all other feelings, both of grief and propriety. A world in which convention and respectability fell away, and he was just a man and she just a woman, felt achingly proximate.

"Here we are," said Mary, and opened the door to a library several times the size of the public reading room at Barrow-In-Furness from whose circulating library Parker had borrowed a book every month as a small boy. He looked up and around at shelf upon shelf of leather-bound books, stretching all the way to the ceiling. He smiled to think of a young Peter in this room, hoovering up the vast stores of esoteric knowledge which he carried with him so lightly.

There was a scattering of other people in the library, Parker saw with some relief. He felt drunk on grief and on his urge to protect Mary from hers, and as so often, his body seemed to vibrate to some silent rhythm of hers. The sombre presence of a few immaculately clad men standing around a table at the far end of the library was perhaps the only thing that prevented him from forgetting who and where he was.

"This is the Denver, library, of course, but as Peter left most of his books to Mother, they're going to stay here for the time being. Some of them were awfully valuable - you know the sorts of things Peter went in for. These are the ones he left for you - his first editions of the Sherlock Holmes stories when they were published together as books. I expect they're worth quite a bit, too, though not as much as all the Elizabethan stuff."

"I'll never sell them," Parker replied, absently. The fine old books exuded Peter, somehow. Parker ran his hand down the spines, then picked up one of the volumes. The pages fell open at "The Adventure of the Empty House." He swallowed.

"No, of course not," Mary agreed, tenderly. He looked up and met her eyes, and the pitying expression in them made him want to cry.

"Mary, I can only imagine how keenly you must feel Peter's loss," he said, suddenly. She looked away, much as her mother had done in the chapel. "Of course I know that you still have your brother the Duke, but you must know that if ever there is anything, no matter how big or small, for which you would have called upon Peter and which you feel you could entrust to me, it would be the honour of my life to perform any service for you." He was seized with panic at his audacity - of course there was nothing improper in his words, but he felt that the desperate desire which underpinned them must be glaringly obvious, and shockingly unsuitable under all the circumstances of the conversation. "I mean, of course, in a truly fraternal spirit" he added, hastily.

Mary's gaze snapped back towards him. "In a fraternal spirit?"

"Well, yes, of course. I mean, I don't presume ever to take a brother's place in your affections, but in your life - so far as pertains to practical matters, at least - if I could be of the least..." Parker trailed off, miserably. The shade of Mary's eyes seemed to have lightened as they flashed at him, so that they were now ice-blue rather than deep violet. Parker took a step back.

Mary's voice was oddly high when she spoke. "Mr Parker, I should have expected so illustrious a detective as you to easily discern that the last thing I want or require is another _brother._ Particularly -"

She didn't finish the sentence, but the words she had not said - "_particularly someone like you" - _rang no less loudly in Parker's ears through the long silence that followed. He looked at her for a long time, not because he relished the sight of her face flushed in anger (although, he thought, it did render her lovelier even than usual) but because he grimly suspected that it would be the last chance he had to do so.

He registered every detail of her face with the accuracy of desperation, and then said quietly, "My profound apologies, Lady Mary. It is to my eternal shame that I could think of no way to alleviate your unhappiness and only succeeded in adding to it. I will not presume to address you again. Thank you for showing me these." He picked up the books, bowed very stiffly and left the library, following the same route back to the Great Hall as they had taken, for although awe-struck by the grandness and scale of the house, and despite his earlier comment to Mary, he was not sufficiently removed from his wits as to be unable to retrace a path. Mary evidently surmised this, or else she did not care, because she did not follow him out of the library, but sank gracefully to a seat in one of the library's alcoves, and let silent tears roll down her face.

When at length the gentlemen at the other end of the library passed by and realised that the deceased's sister was sitting crying, they sprang into action. Colonel Marchbanks sent one of the other men to fetch his wife (and the good Mrs Marchbanks, as she hastily and kindly bustled to Mary's side, said to herself, "I'm glad that her strength has broken now. It was brave but it wasn't good for her, being so composed in the face of such news, the poor dear.")

"There, there, my dear," Colonel Marchbanks said with a kindness in directly inverse proportion to the helpfulness of his words, as they waited. "Was it the interview with the gentlemen who has just left which has so upset you?"

"It can't have been," the Hon. James Brierley replied for the still weeping Lady Mary. "That wasn't anybody - just that policeman friend of Peter's, wasn't it?"

"Yes, yes", Mary confirmed with a hysterical laugh which made the gentlemen long still more ardently for the capable Mrs Marchbanks' arrival. "Just that policeman friend of Peter's. Nobody at all."

———

On his long train journey back to London, Parker attempted to calm himself with the cold comfort that at least he had been spared the humiliation of making the proposal he had so carefully planned only two months earlier. If Lady Mary had despised him so much in the character of a quasi-brother, he could only imagine her contempt had he offered himself in the character of a lover.

Of course he had always known about the great wealth and rank of the milieu to which both Peter and Mary had belonged, but seeing them so frequently in relatively normal surroundings - even in Peter's Piccadilly flat, wildly expensive though it surely was, was a world away from Duke's Denver - had lulled him into insensibility as to the sheer force of the difference between his world and theirs. It seemed now the maddest of dreams that he had ever contemplated asking Lady Mary Wimsey to join him in his.

————

Parker returned to London and after some months had passed, he realised that his life had done the once-unthinkable and returned, more or less, to a pre-Wimsey state of affairs. He didn't move out of the Great Ormond Street flat - it was quite fine enough for his own purposes as a bachelor with simple tastes, after all. He substantially increased his charitable donations and the money he sent home to his mother, and the rest of his now surplus money he saved, with the vague feeling that he might make a generous endowment to the Barrow-In-Furness Grammar School at some point. He excelled as a Chief-Inspector, and people began to talk of yet further promotion as an inevitability. He enjoyed a drink with Dorridge and his other friends every so often. But he almost never smiled.

By the next Christmas, he had ceased to write letters to Lady Mary, even in his head. The only one he had ever sent had been a note in late March, when for a brief period the blossoming of the trees and the brightening of the skies had swept him along into the heady delusion that all hope could not be lost in so beautiful a world. He had written,

_Dear Lady Mary_

_I apologise again for the clumsiness and presumption on my part which made our last meeting so painful. Under the circumstances it feels impossible that I should ask to see you, so I don't. But please do remember in any exigency that I remain your most devoted friend,_

_Charles Parker._

Looking at it, he reflected that the first sentence made it sound as though he had been guilty of some far greater impropriety than he actually had, but he had addressed it and put it in the post. He had received no reply.

He had nonetheless been unable to resist the urge to compose impassioned letters in his head sometimes, often late at night. But the contents were not the sorts of things that he would have committed to paper, even had things been altogether different. And after a while, he stopped doing even this. He grew to take a sort of dreary comfort in the safety of hopelessness.

It was a gentle shock to receive a Christmas card from the Dowager Duchess. It contained a kind message written in handwriting he'd never seen before but which was so full of liveliness and wit that he would have picked it out as the Dowager's out of many samples. He reflected that the old lady, of whom he had not ceased to be a fond admirer, was his last remaining connection to the Wimsey family. He put the card sadly in a pile on his desk - he acknowledged the season with no decoration at his home - without even noticing that she had written a Bible verse, Psalm 30:5, in the top left hand corner, let alone looking it up and pondering what she may have been trying to tell him.


	7. 7

"Peter, you absolutely infernal old idiot. I can hardly stand the sight of you."

Lord Peter Wimsey, renowned for his aplomb in almost any situation, was visibly somewhat taken aback by this greeting from his sister. It seemed particularly unfriendly given that it was the first time they had seen each other after an absence of nearly two years, during which she had known him to be in extreme danger.

He had otherwise been received by his friends and family with an almost universally rapturous delight. Granted, the Duchess of Denver's joy had been muted - so muted, in fact, that a casual observer might have been forgiven for wondering whether it was actually there at all - but this was surprising to precisely no one who knew both Peter and his sister-in-law, and certainly not to Peter himself. More notable to him had been the almost indiscernible note of reserve which had underlain the otherwise warm reception he'd had from Charles Parker when they had been reunited in the garden of the mysterious house in Hampstead Heath under the very dramatic circumstances of Lord Peter's resurrection and the mass arrest of the most sophisticated criminal gang Scotland Yard had encountered.

Parker's first reaction upon Bunter arriving at Scotland Yard with the whole incredible saga on his lips, _had _been one of delight -in fact, he'd realised when he finally he got into bed at about nine am the next morning, after bursting onto the scene at Hampstead Heath with his men, making a frenzy of dramatic and high profile arrests and then laying eyes on the dazed face of the friend he had mourned so deeply, that his face was hurting from so much grinning. But as the adrenaline of the magnificent exploit wore off and his brain processed the news more slowly, there had been a change in Parker's feelings.

Peter had taken pains to seek out Parker the day after the bust, and the evening after that. But Parker had been first out and about on an unconnected case, and then dining with the chief commissioner, and had had to send apologetic scrawled notes deeply and sincerely regretting that he couldn't join Peter. Two evenings later, a subordinate at Scotland Yard who answered Parker's line told Peter that the chief inspector was at the Rose and Crown with some of the other detectives. Peter had thanked the officer courteously and hung up the phone thoughtfully. That other people's lives would move on in such a way that his place in them was no longer what it had been, or that their feeling for him might be altered, was a consequence of his adventure which he had genuinely not considered. The men dined together at the end of the week with every cordiality but not, Peter thought, with quite the easy companionship of old.

If Peter could explain the uneasy shift in the sands between him and the man who had once been his most intimate friend - after all, it was natural that a proud man should resent having been put in a false position by publicly grieving someone who was in rude health all along - no easy explanation suggested itself for his sisters frosty reception when they met, ten days after Peter's resurrection, at Duke's Denver. Unlike his mother, brother and even sister-in-law, Mary had not rushed into the vast and chilly entrance hall to welcome him. He had found her a couple of hours later in the Long Gallery, walking its length with her usual swift motion but with a swan-like grace which did credit to the many hours of instruction in deportment that she had resentfully undergone as a child. Peter fell into step with her.

"Look here, Polly," he remonstrated, "I don't see what you've got to be so awfully cut up about. You're one of the tiny fraction of people who knew all along that I was perfectly healthy, don't you know."

"Yes, and a jolly lot of fun _that _was," his sister replied contemptuously. He looked at her pale face, outlined in the dreary January afternoon light which came creeping through the arched windows which lined the gallery, and with a little start remembered that she was now nearly thirty.

"Honestly, Peter. Two years of distress and upheaval, and so much happiness wasted, just so that you can have another moment of needless glory." Her voice was icy and she didn't return his gaze.

"What happiness wasted?" he demanded. His voice was light, but only from force of habit. "I was just the man for this job precisely because nobody's happiness depends on me, old thing. And in the three cases where I flattered myself that anyone's happiness might be impaired by my untimely demise, well -" Lord Peter spread his hands expressively.

Lady Mary was unmoved. "Nobody's happiness depends on you, indeed. You're not the one who spent months consoling poor Gherkins, or receiving endless visits from a drunk and despondent uncle Paul, or replying to letters full of outpourings of grief. And then there's the people who made very little show of grief but who felt it nonetheless. A friend can feel loss as deeply and bitterly as anyone, as you would know if you had a normal capacity for human emotion. You don't deserve the friendship of those who do."

"But I say, Mary, you -"

But Lady Mary had not yet finished and her brother knew better than pursue his interruption when she carried on, her voice brittle.

"And all for cold, hard money and another dramatic appearance in the newspapers! It would be one thing, perhaps if you had been infiltrating a gang or murderers or slave people or something. But all that pain, all that life interrupted, and just to stop thefts of ugly old jewels and things that nobody needed anyway." She tossed her immaculately shaped head with disgust, but still did not look at him.

Lord Peter considered his sister for a while. He would have much enjoyed a robust debate about the importnace to be attributed by a civilised society to offences against property, but he sensed that this was not the time. His attention was caught by what she had said about friendship, and he realised uncomfortably that it had struck more of a nerve with him than he would have expected.

"Mary, did you see much of old Parker while I was ... otherwise occupied?"

If he'd hoped that the change of subject would have a calming effect, he was disappointed. Mary was a picture of cold ire as she replied.

"Of course not. How could I look him in the eye and withhold from him that his friend was still alive? _You _may be able to treat the feelings of other people as though they're just a game, Peter, but I can't."

They continued to walk in silence for a while. All the things that Peter could have said - about how the war had derailed his perception of the value of life so that the fact of anyone's existence seemed surreal and not to be taken seriously, and about how, deep down, he hadn't thought that anybody cared that much - died in his throat.

"I'm sorry, old girl," he said, simply. Mary turned to look at him at last, her eyes narrow with suspicion. It wasn't like Peter to offer a sincere and unqualified apology. But his expression was serious, and her face softened a little.

They gazed out of the window together at the cold drizzle. "It's supposed to be fine tomorrow. told me so as we drove through." Lord Peter spoke tentatively, as if this intelligence of better weather were a peace offering.

"I imagine you'd find fine weather more fitting for your glorious return than these drab dregs of winter" Mary said, her voice exasperated now, rather than cold.

"Spring would be more congenial, certainly" Peter agreed. "Around Easter time, perhaps. Our Lord arranged things far better." He thought he saw the corner of his sister's mouth twitching.

A smartly uniformed figure appeared at the far end of the Gallery. "What is it, Betty?"

"Please, my Lord, his Grace says he's found a bottle of the 1889 Champagne."

"Thank you. We'll be down at once." Betty curtsied and disappeared.

"A bottle of the 1889, eh? _That's _worth resurrecting for, at any rate." Peter smiled appeasingly, and set off down the stairs with a light bounce.

"Infernal old idiot," Mary said again as she followed at a little distance down the magnificent carved staircase. She was not smiling, but she said it more forgivingly this time.

————

By the middle of the spring, almost all of the old camaraderie was restored between Chief Inspector Parker and Lord Peter Wimsey. The business of working together, first on the preparation of the evidence and for the trial of the criminal mastermind and his associates who had been snared by Peter's adventure, and then on an unconnected dope distribution imvestigation upon which Parker had consulted Peter, did more to repair the frayed bond than any apology could have done. They dined together weekly when Lord Peter was in town, and the change in Parker's station impressed itself upon his friend as he noticed the respect with which Parker was treated at the places he was known, and that it was now unusual for waiters or doormen to give the two of them - an aristocrat and a burly policeman with traces of a northern accent, a second glance.

So it was that on the morning of 14th April, Parker was looking forward enthusiastically to the fishing weekend that he and Peter had planned for later in the month, as he sat in his office at Scotland Yard, reviewing reports which his subordinates had produced for him and considering his next steps on the case they related to. A glorious warm sun floated through the window, tempered by the freshness of a blossom-scented breeze. Parker lowered the paper in his hand and sighed. The spring was, always, the time when his love for Lady Mary Wimsey gave him the most difficulty. He thought it was not unlike the way his mother's rheumatism was always there, but made itself felt more painfully in the winter.

No word about Lady Mary had passed between he and Lord Peter. Peter had tried to introduce the subject not long after his dramatic return - just after the family had gathered at Duke's Denver to welcome him home - but Parker had shut him down with firm finality. The hideous ache of Lady Mary's contempt for him on their last meeting had never left Parker. It lay coiled within him, ready to spring out and strike at any provocation - and sometimes at none at all - and he could not bear to have it prodded by any mention of her. Lord Peter had given him a thoughtful look and then courteously changed the subject at once.

Charles Parker was an old hand at enduring stoically what could not be cured, and he knew that he had only to wait for the stale heat of summer in London to set in, and the worst of this acute pain would be over. It would recur again, of course. He had long since understood that his was the sort of chivalric love which requires no regular contact or even the slightest hope of return in order to sustain itself for a life time. But the sharpness of this moment would abate. Whilst it lasted, he allowed himself the unaccustomed pleasure of thinking of her, and of remembering in vivid detail every time that his hand had touched hers.

There was a knock at the door, and Parker looked up sharply. His eyes had lost their glazed look before constable Mason's head was around the door, saying cheerfully, "There's a Lady Mary Wimsey here to see you, sir. Will I show her in?"

"Show her in?" the Chief Inspector repeated, stupidly, as though constable Mason had suggested that they run away to the circus together. "Lady Mary? Yes, yes, show her in." Mason nodded deferentially if perhaps a little pityingly, and disappeared. Parker stood up, sat down, and stood up again. He felt frantic and sick, and the near certainty he had had only moments before that he should never see her again in this life now seemed almost desirable in contrast to the wretched excitement of a hope he knew to be doomed.

"Lady Mary Wimsey, sir," Mason's cheerful, everyday tones seemed to Parker entirely unsuitable for the pronouncement of her name under these circumstances, their meeting after so long an absence and so decisive a rupture. But he nodded with brisk politeness to dismiss the constable, and stepped forward to take Mary's hand in his.

She was as exquisitely dressed as ever, in a pale blue which would have risked over-emphasising the slightly icy quality to her fairness, were it not for the delicate flush across her cheeks. She looked older than the last time they had met, and even more lovely. There was a depth and shade to her beauty which there had not been before. Parker swallowed. He could have gazed at her all day, but he stepped forward and took her hand, respectfully, as if it were the first time he had ever touched her. The old jolt of electricity at the feel of her soft, delicate hands was still there, and with a vengeance. It was all he could do to say in a reasonably steady voice, "Lady Mary. I'm so very pleased to see you."

Mary's voice was not quite steady as she replied, "And I you, Mr Parker," but she looked unflinchingly into his eyes and smiled a smile which dispelled any associations with coldness. With what felt like a physically painful wrench, he released her hand and they stood and looked at one another. Parker gestured to a chair. "Please sit down, Lady Mary," he said, and watched admiringly the light gracefulness of her movement as she did so before recollecting himself and abruptly sitting down opposite her, behind his desk.

Sitting down didn't appear to have had quite the sense-restoring effect that he had hoped. At length, inanely but feeling that someone ought to say something, Parker said, "I suppose I ought to congratulate you on the recent reacquisition of your brother."

Mary smiled rather wryly. "It hadn't the merit of being entirely unexpected for me, you know. I don't know whether Peter told you that my mother and I were the only people who knew; other than Bunter, I mean." Parker nodded. "A somewhat dubious privilege, I imagine, for someone who naturally inclines to truth and openness rather than subterfuge."

"I don't know if my inclinations are quite as noble as you so sweetly believe," Mary grinned the boyish grin which Parker had not seen for many months - even years - and which caused his racing heart to suddenly (though momentarily) stop beating altogether. "But I'm so hopeless a liar that it's as well for me to avoid subterfuge at all costs, whatever I may feel about it. Which is why - I mean - I found it very difficult to pretend, particularly to those who were sorrowing, that Peter was dead. Particularly to you."

"Why particularly to me?" Parker had intended that his voice be light and suggestive only of a detached curiosity. That was not how it came out.

"Because you were - are - such friends, of course. And because it hurt me to see you bereaved and to know it was in my power to alleviate your suffering and not to do so. And because I had never wanted to deceive you about anything."

Mary's words hung in the air between them. All Parker's old hopes and dreams came rushing triumphantly back into his head with a torrential force. "And that's why you didn't answer my letter?"

"Yes. I had thought - we both had, mother and I - that it would be all over with Peter much more quickly, you see. That he would find the silly gang people and saunter over to your office, or telephone you, or whatever he was going to do, and you'd arrest them and you'd know he was alive and the game would be up. I thought it was simplest to wait until that happened than to correspond with you, which would only lead to you asking to see me, and I knew I couldn't look you in the eye and lie, even by omission. I had no idea it would take so long."

Parker considered this at length. Misinterpreting his silence, Mary flushed and said in her most regal tones, "I mean - I thought that if we corresponded that you would be liable to ask to see me, simply because that's been the pattern of our friendship, rather than -"

Parker took pity on her and grinned broadly, only just stopping himself from reaching across and taking her hand again as he said warmly "I most certainly would have been liable to ask to see you. I think you're probably safest to assume that I'll always be liable to ask that, for the rest of my days."

The tension in the air seemed to dissipate, pushed out by the sunbeams dancing in the shaft of light which was between them. Mary's smile was immeasurably lighter and happier than it had been she she came in. Parker was now a relatively powerful man in Scotland Yard, and due to his size, strength and vigour he had unconsciously enjoyed a certain type of power all his adult life, the sort of power which a man who has no fears for his own immmediate physical safety as he moves through the world takes for granted. But he felt that the power to raise such a smile from such a woman was the most extraordinary capability that he had ever possessed.

It occurred to him that nobody entered his office these days without knocking, and that when people knocked, if he shouted out "Go away!", as he had done once when deep in thought and on the cusp of cracking a seemingly water-right alibi, any would-be intruders would comply with his command. It was a very different kettle of fish, being a Chief Inspector. For an exhilarating moment, he did not see why he shouldn't go over to her, take her in his arms and kiss her. Every cell in his body growled at him, urging him to do so.

But caution was an unbreakable habit for Parker. He thought of the words that had passed between them in the library at Duke's Denver, and the unshakeable conviction that Mary, however graciously she may condescend to think of him as a friend, could never think of him as anything more. Hadn't she said "the last thing I want is another brother" (words which were much easier to account for with the knowledge that she was not, in fact, in mourning for one of her brothers at the time), "particularly not -"

She hadn't finished the sentence but there hadn't been any doubt that the rest of the sentence would have been "particularly not _you_".

So he didn't kiss her. He merely smiled back - a warm, genuine beaming smile because for that moment the sight of her, the expectation that he could once again see her regularly, and write to her, perhaps, and call her his friend, was so much more than he had hoped for only ten minutes before, that it was enough. He knew it wouldn't be enough for long, of course, but for a short time he was perfectly content.

"Dare I to hope that we can resume our friendship as it was, Lady Mary?" he asked. For a man with such sharp powers of deduction, it was astonishing that he should not know how to interpret as a flash of disappointment the cloud that passed over Mary's face. But she too rallied, replied cheerfully that she should love nothing better, and asked if he were busy on a case, or whether he could take her out to tea.

"I'm going to Italy for 3 months tomorrow, you see, to stay with Lady Hamilton at the old palazzo she's bought in Fiesole. I'm to help her with the restoration - it'll beterribly exciting, from a decorative point of view. I was planning to wait and see whether you would write to me, you see, but then as the day approached I found I couldn't leave without seeing you and making friends."

Parker had a particularly large amount of work to do, but he would have worked all night for the rest of the werk rather than let the chance to spend the afternoon with Lady Mary slip away. He stood up at once. "Nothing in the world would give me greater pleasure than to take you out to tea. Let me just give some instructions to one of the men," he said, as they left his office, and he poked his head around the door of the first office they passed on their way back to the staircase.

"Hullo, Dorridge, I've something important to attend to. Have you the time to go through these reports on the Garleigh case, and list out what needs immediate further investigation and in what order?" he asked, thrusting a a sheaf of papers into the detective-inspector's hand. Although Dorridge was now his subordinate, the two were still close friends, and Parker didn't miss the waggled eyebrow and the wink as Dorridge caught sight of Lady Mary in the corridor, replied cheerily in the affirmative and took the papers from him. Parker knew he would hear more about this in the form of good-natured teasing and intrusive questions, but he found that he didn't care - even when he realised that the two other detectives who had been in with Dorridge discussing plans for a raid had scurried to the door and were watching him and Lady Mary as they walked away.

"Blimey, she's a stunner! I don't wonder at the chief losing his head," one commented, at a discreet volume.

"Bit out of his league, though, isn't she? She's a duchess or something - I've seen her in the society pages," the other replied rashly, thereby exposing himself to weeks of joshing about his interest in high society.

"Let's let her be the judge of that, shall we?" Dorridge put in, loyally. "Come on, back to work."

And when Parker returned to the office two hours later, he was smiling in such an unaccustomedly dreamy way that nobody could find it in their heart to tease him, after all. He carried on smiling as he worked long into the night, and all the way home, long after midnight, to Great Ormond Street.


	8. 8

"_You're making Mary damned unhappy, Charles, and I wish you'd marry her and have done with it."_

In the hours following their surprising conversation, it was these words, more than any of the others which Lord Peter had uttered, which reverberated around Charles Parker's head. They echoed in his ears like a reproof, but also like the hopeful ringing of church bells across green fields on a fine spring morning.

It had taken many years, but he had congratulated himself, as he passed a quiet Christmas five days earlier, on finally succeeding in regulating his passion for Lady Mary. He had not conquered it, of course, but he never hoped to do that. Instead he felt that he had_, _by infinitely small degrees, coaxed himself into a state of peaceful resignation that she could never be his, and had settled down to a life of quiet devotion, content that the friendship between them was reestablished and that he could look forward to seeing her once in awhile. He had quite convinced himself that he dreamed of nothing more.

That was all nonsense, of course. After Wimsey had left Parker's office with a few desultory words about the Philip Boyes case, Parker carefully made sure that the door was closed, and leaning against it, he realised that he had started to tremble. All the visions he had so sternly denied himself since the reignition of his friendship with Lady Mary the previous spring - visions of her beautiful face looking up at him with something other than friendship, of her in his arms - flooded into his mind in a chaotic and delirious jumble. Parker rarely drank spirits, but he poured himself a whisky from the bottle he had in his cupboard (used ordinarily to celebrate late night break-throughs on difficult casss with his colleagues) and drank it off in one go. He sat the tumbler down on his desk with a steadier hand.

Calmer, his natural caution teasserted itself and he suddenly asked himself whether it were possible that Peter had misunderstood Mary's feelings. After all, his impression was that the two of them were hardly given to free and frank discussions of their emotional lives.

This thought set him off on a too-familiar pendulum of hope and doubt, onto which this time he refused to be drawn. He pushed hos doubts aside with impatience, knowing that he would never again have such a pressing case for declaring himself to Lady Mary. For perhaps the only time in his life, it was time to throw caution entirely to the winds. "It's now or never, old man," he said to himself, his voice shaking as much as his body had earlier as he carefully replaced the cap on the whisky bottle and put it away. Before he could think more about it, he reached for the telephone.

————

Lady Mary had just come in from a long and glorious ride across the Denver estate, whose bridlepaths were well maintained and whose undulating contours were perfect for a wintry gallop. She stepped into the marble entrance hall to remove her mud-soaked boots for the servants to carry away and clean, and was just about to go upstairs when the butler approached her with his usual expression of respectful efficiency. "What is it, Ridley?"

"My lady, you're wanted on the telephone. I was in the process of taking a message when Andrews said he'd heard you come in."

"If it's Lady Sylvia again about her beastly New Year's masquerade party, you can tell her I've still no intention of going," Mary replied, half laughing, as she carefully took off her tailored riding jacket and handed it to the imperturbable Ridley. Sylvia was not the only of Mary's friends to express astonishment and dismay that Mary, the prettiest, noblest and richest of them all, were still unmarried and to slyly produce eligible men at every opportunity, but she was the most persistent. And in truth, as she got older it had become difficult for Mary to justify even to herself why she didn't pursue any of the romantic opportunities which came her way. It was ridiculous to wait endlessly for a declaration of love which would never come, but there it was. It had been years now since she had been able to entertain the idea of intimacy with any man but Charles Parker, and since no intimacy with him appeared to be on the table, she was gradually acquiring a reputation as an ice maiden.

"It's Chief-Inspector Parker from Scotland Yard, my Lady". Ridley's tone was even more unctuously respectful than usual, to hide his inner disapproval. He was the Duchess's favourite servant and he had adopted her views on a number of questions as his own.

"Oh! Yes, I'll speak to him." Mary's face was flushed; but then, she had just come in from brisk exercise in the winter cold.

Ridley preceded her to the telephone receiver, into which he announced portentously, "Lady Mary Wimsey", before handing it to her. The effect was very grand, though this was undermined somewhat by Mary following his words with a simple, friendly "Hullo, Charles."

"Lady Mary, may I see you?" Parker had not intended his words to be so abrupt and forceful, but the sound of her clear, high voice had had its usual effect on him and in his heightened pitch of excitement, it had been enough to push the smooth, studied opening line that he had prepared right out of his head.

Mary bit her bottom lip. She remembered her conversation with Peter on Boxing Day night and her brother's promise to speak to Charles- indeed, she had thought of very little else since it took place. But she had not expected anything to come of it so soon. Good old Peter.

"Yes, of course. I'm coming up to Town tomorrow for an evening party. Shall I come a little earlier, and we can have tea?"

She supposed that it would be more seemly to be slightly less eager; but then, she rightly surmised that Peter would have given Charles no indication that she knew about their conversation.

"Oh, splendid!" Parker replied, and he meant it. He hadn't expected her to be coming up to London so soon - indeed he remembered her saying in the autumn she didn't plan to be in town again until the spring - and had thought that he would need to steel himself to come down and make his proposal in the off-putting environs of Duke's Denver. London would be far more neutral and encouraging.

They agreed to meet at Euston station at three the next day, and rang off, with rather less friendly conversation than usual. Mary handed the receive calmly to Ridley, and then, halfway out of the room, turned round and said casually, "Oh, yes. Ridley, would you telephone to the Attenburys and leave a message for Lady Sylvia that I shall come and stay with her after all. I shall be up in time for her party tomorrow, although I may be rather late. I can't say quite what time I shall arrive. And send Morton to me when you see her. I shall need her to pack my things."

She walked up the wide and gracious staircase nonchalantly, although nobody was watching. When she reached her own apartment, she sat down in a fine old armchair which Helen had banished from the reception rooms and Mary had happily accommodated in her own rooms, and released a long, tremulous breath, her eyes shining with tears. And then, being Mary, she set about deciding what to wear.

———-

Mary's train got in to Euston at quarter past three the following day. She saw Parker standing calmly on the platform, watching the flocks of people rushing around with the calmness of a man confident of being in the correct place and tall enough to see over the heads of those in front of him. He was wearing a very good overcoat which looked new.

He was waiting at the door to her carriage when the train stopped, and opened it with a shy, uncharacteristically boyish smile. Mary was the first of the first class passengers to alight - the few others had let her pass before them, with an admiring glance in the case of the gentlemen and an indulgent smile in the case of the two middle-aged matrons who had noticed her eagerly scanning the crowd on the platform as the train pulled up, and seen the smile, unmistakably that of love expectant, which illuminated her face as she spotted the person she was looking for.

Mary's coat and gloves were emerald green, her hat and boots were black, the latter were high-heeled, and all of it was beautifully cut, modest but conveying an impression of subtle lavishness. But if Charles Parker took any of it in, it was sub-consciously. As he handed her down from the train carriage, he was conscious only of her eyes and the supple loveliness of her body as she moved. He thought, as he had thought before, that she moved like grass sways in a light wind - with an easy, unstudied grace.

Every time Parker saw her, he felt how absurdly unlikely it was that such a woman were coming to meet a perfectly ordinary chap like him. On this occasion the mad presumption of his mission struck him, and forcefully. But rather than deterring him, he felt elated at the thought, buoyed by the knowledge of his boldness and the hope that it was of the type that fortune could not resist favouring. He grinned and didn't let go of her hand. At length, they spoke at the same time.

"Charles -"

"Lady Mary -"

They both stopped, still smiling, and stood until the whirling and rushing of the other passengers around them began to die down, and it became clear even to them that at some point they must move. Charles retrieved Mary's case from the porter, and swung it lightly as they started to walk off. It was not light, and he knew that he was showing off in a thoroughly juvenile way, but he was not fool enough not to see that Mary admired the power of his body just as he admired the lightness of hers, and his excess of excited energy had to have an outlet of some kind.

"Would you like tea now?" he asked as they passed off the platform. Mary shook her head. "No thank you. Let's walk somewhere." She wasn't sure whether she could eat or even drink anything at all.

"It's raining a bit," Parker warned her, practical even in moments of intense emotional excitement. "Shall you mind?"

"Not a bit," Mary smiled, and in fact by the time they came out of the station the rain had stopped, leaving only a softness in the atmosphere and a misty glow in the reflections cast by the lights of the newly lit lamps. As they walked vaguely in the direction of Russel Square they talked, in nervous slightly staccato sentences, about how they had spent Christmas. Parker had been working. He referred to the Boyes case, wondering whether Peter had mentioned it to Mary.

"Oh yes," she said. "The poor woman Peter's on a mission to save. I haven't paid the case much attention - I don't, usually, with unpleasant things which one can't do anything about. Do you still think she did it?"

"I'm not sure," Parker said, slowly. "The evidence still points to her pretty decisively. There's nothing other than Peter's strong conviction so far to cast any doubt. I haven't known him to be wrong when he gets a bee in his bonnet before. But then, I've never seen him in -" he stopped himself, not knowing whether Peter's discussion with Mary had included the crucial fact that Peter was in love with the accused. "Involved in a case on a different side from me", he hurriedly corrected.

"Would it cause you difficulties, if it turned out that she were innocent?" That was how it struck Mary, of course, not knowing about her brother's emotional affliction - a question of what it would mean for Charles.

"Not really," he said, looking down at her upturned face, wondering at the colossal stroke of luck that meant that through the strange perambulations of chance and fate, somehow he was walking with her down a bustling London street at dusk on New Years Eve, and she was looking at him as though he were the only person in the world. "If some dreadful flaw in our investigation were uncovered then that would be sticky indeed, but that won't happen. Our work was solid enough. If she gets off it will be because Wimsey pulls some new evidence we couldn't reasonably have been expected to have found out of nowhere. It'll be glory for him but no disgrace to us.

"And you know, even if it were, I'd suffer any amount of professional discomfort rather than the wrong person be hanged. The possibility of that is the spectre that's always before us, the reason why we have to be so cautious and careful all the time, and it's why cases where there's no confession and where all the evidence is circumstantial never really leave your mind."

Mary thought about this. "I know that Mother used to think - and still does think -detecting was bad for Peter, for that reason. It was all right when it was just lost diamonds and things, but when people's lives depend on it, she thinks the responsibility weighs on him and makes him nervy. I suppose I somehow imagined that you were immune from all of that."

"I've a much more phlegmatic disposition," Parker agreed, "and I think that there can be as much moral blame in inaction as for the things we do. If we, or men like us, didn't work scrupulously to bring criminals to justice - well, the world would be far worse off. And I'm part of the system, of course - just a man earning his living rather than one taking matters into how own hands for fun - which helps, I think."

"No", he said, realising it as he spoke, "on balance I hope he can pull it off. As long as the woman didn't do it, I mean. It'd - well, it'd be nice to see him happy."

"Oh, well, he'll have another case after a while I expect in any event, or go on holiday to cheer himself up," said Mary, who was reasonably enough taken aback by the idea of Peter's happiness being much affected either way. Parker cursed himself for forgetting again. It occurred to him how difficult it is to be anything but utterly candid with a woman with whom one is truly in sympathy. More to change the subject than for any real desire to go in, he said quickly "we're passing the British Museum. Shall we go in?"

"Yes, let's." Mary was surprised, but agreed out of a sense that a place where a more intimate conversation could be had would be no bad thing, although she had no urge to consider the museum's many fine antiquities plundered from around the world at that precise moment.

They walked into the cavernous entrance, acknowledged only by a harassed looking attendant who said rather pointedly "We close at five today". Inspired by the almost total absence of other visitors, Parker led the way deep into a dark and vast gallery with an ornate ceiling. To his great joy, it contained no living soul other than an elderly curator sitting in a corner who, most satisfactorily, gave every appearance of being fast asleep.

Mary looked around and, with a mental sigh, was preparing to say something bright and intelligent about the Elgin Marbles when Parker spoke. His already deep voice came out deeper than ever, and gruffer, and he took her hand. Mary was thoroughly prepared for what he was going to say, which made it perfectly ridiculous that she should feel so nervous that she could hardly breathe.

"Lady Mary, you must forgive me for addressing you in this way, and believe that I've battled with all my force against a desire to do so for many, many years. I've loved you since the night at Peter's flat when you came to me and made that false confession - perhaps even from the day that I first saw you. Loving you is - well, it's bound up in my very being and I'll never stop, regardless of the outcome of this conversation. But you have only to say the word and I'll never speak to you of this again."

Incongruously, Mary was conscious mostly of a wave of relief washing over her whole body. After so long, the years and years of wondering whether his feelings really were what she had hoped them to be, then of fearing that after all they were merely fraternal, of asking herself whether she were the biggest fool in Christendom for wasting her time and her youth, of laboriously deflecting would-be suitors, and questions from her mother and criticisms from Helen - finally, it was over. Her lips parted but she found that she couldn't speak.

Parker pressed on, his voice so low and urgent that it felt like a physical touch. "You know that I'm just a policeman, who has no business making an offer to a Duke's daughter. There's no getting around it, and I can't change it. I'm doing well, and I think it's likely I'll do even better before many years are out, but at best my station can only be that of a very successful policeman from modest beginnings, and I'll never attain anything like the kind of wealth which you must rightly feel is your due. But I'll work like a dog to give you everything I can, and I'd die rather than make you unhappy."

Mary tried to speak again, but the connection between her brain and vocal chords seemed to have been lost. Unexpectedly, she felt tears prickling at her eyes and then running silently down her face. Parker swallowed and then with infinite gentleness brought his strong, rough hands to her face and wiped them away with his thumbs. Her whole body responded. The gentle strength of his touch sent a current through her, and her blood ran hot. She felt far too warm in her winter coat, and involuntarily she stepped closer to him so that there was less than an inch between their bodies. The sharp click of her heel on the polished floor echoed sharply around the hall, but it seemed to come from a hundred miles away.

"I love you," and he spoke now in only a whisper. "I love you, Mary. I love you." The relief of saying it at last was enormous: he didn't seem able to stop. Suddenly he knelt down before her. He hadn't planned to do so - he was an old fashioned man and it had seemed to him a fitting way to propose, but he thought of Mary as far more modern and unconventional, and had suspected she might not approve. But in the half-light of the empty gallery, with her beautiful violet eyes turned up so tenderly towards him and his hand lightly brushing her delicate cheek - it seemed out of the question to do anything else. There had always been a strong element of the _preux chevalier _about Parker's love, and it seemed natural and right that he should kneel before his lady. He took her hand in his again, and brought it reverently and tenderly to his lips. "Marry me, Mary," he said in a low voice. It was both a supplication and a command. He had meant to ask the question in a more formal way, the world and all its trappings had at last receded, and he felt at last that he was, after all, just a man, and she just a woman, and he knew that she loved and wanted him. When he raised his eyes to her, she was weeping and smiling. She gently pulled at his hand, prompting him to stand again, closer to her even than before.

At last she spoke. "Charles - dearest, dearest Charles - I'd have married you years ago if you'd asked, you perfect idiot." At her words they both broke into the joyous laughter of relief and exhilaration. Mary's conscious thought was that it was as though she had had a bad headache, lasting years, which had suddenly melted away.

Her hand was still in his - it seemed reasonable at that point never to let it go - and when their laughter died down, Charles bent his head to hers. He had intended the kiss to be courtly and tender, and that was how it started. But as his lips touched hers and he felt the tremble in her breath, his other hand had to go somewhere, and it seemed to want to caress her beautiful delicate cheek, flushed like pink roses on snow, and then to move round to the back of her head so that he could kiss her harder. As he held her to him, forgetting in his passion to temper the force of his movements, he felt her gasp into his mouth. He was about to pull away when she whispered his name through his kiss and there was a sort of sob of longing in her voice - a sound more exquisite than any he had heard in his life, female rather than feminine - and he lost control entirely. He let go of her hand and placed his freed hand on the small of her back, pressing her to him as a drowning man to a life buoy, and he felt her arms come up around his neck. He didn't know that he was talking, but he murmured "I love you - oh God, Mary, I love you" into her mouth and down the side of her face and into her neck. He was transported by her response to his passion, and felt that even if he should die the next day and never know any pleasure again, the whole messy business of living would have been worth it for the wonder of that moment. Still, he was holding her so close that it was impossible that, even through their winter clothes, she should not be aware of the very tangible manifestation of his desire and he broke away, breathing raggedly, lest she be shocked or consider him brutish or unseemly.

"I'm sorry," he said, clumsily, "you're so beautiful - I've wanted you for so long - I forget myself."

"Oh, Charles. Please, carry on forgetting," Mary replied. Her voice was rich with desire, lower than he'd ever heard it, both completely like and unlike its normal sound and he thrilled to think that he would be the only person to hear her speak in this way. Her arms were still around his neck, and she stood on tip-toe to kiss him.

To the extent that he had permitted himself to dream of this sort of scene, he had imagined Mary gracefully accepting his caresses. That she should reciprocate them was unexpected, like a vista of some fabulous hanging gardens opening up as one turns the corner of an apparently ordinary street, and it was the undoing of him.

He groaned with mingled pleasure and frustration as he responded, his hands at her waist - a part of her he'd seldom allowed himself to look at for any length of time, let alone to touch - and before many minutes had passed, his tongue was in her mouth. He lost any consciousness of his own body at all - he was aware only of Mary, and it seemed to him that he had melted into the atmosphere and was the earth beneath her feet and the air upon her face. He was not at all sure, afterwards, that he had not in his mad elation been on the verge of unbottoning her coat when with a sudden snort and a scuffle, the presence of the elderly curator made itself known.

It only half-restored them to their senses, but they were at least conscious again of their surroundings, and they broke apart, smiling with breathless sheepishness at one another. Mary bit her lower lip and Charles only just prevented himself from groaning again. They were at the other end of the gallery from the curator, and suffusing the room was that late winter afternoon light which is almost dimmer than no light at all, but Parker peered and could see that the fellow was going through the stages of waking up in public and then pretending that he had been awake all along. Parker nodded at him politely, and with his still-shaking hand lightly touching Mary's back started to walk back towards the exit of the gallery.

The curator, in fact, was a man much given to resting his eyes in the late afternoons but not at all in favour of afternoon naps. Although he had devoted his life to the classics, he was sentimental at heart and had felt the pleasant stirrings of long buried romance in his heart as he listened to the exchange of the two lovers in the galllery. He had felt, in the end, that a line must be drawn somewhere when it came to amorous activity in the presence of the Parthenon antiquities, but as they left he remarked, apparently to nobody, "The round reading room is seldom visited at this hour of the day."


End file.
